Advisory board (at present)
Herman Van Rompuy (Chairman)
Maurice Velge
Bernard Coulie
Academic coordinators
Bernard Coulie (Université catholique de Louvain)
Vincent Dujardin (Université catholique de Louvain)
Luc Duerloo (UAntwerpen)
Chair holders
Université catholique de Louvain
Luuk van Middelaar (°1973) studied History and Philosophy at the Universities of Groningen and Paris-IV Sorbonne (1991-1999) and Political Theory at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris (1999-2002). In 1999 he published Politicide: de moord op de politiek in de Franse filosofie (Politicide: The Murder of Politics in French Philosophy) which was awarded the Prix de Paris. He obtained his doctorate degree cum laude in 2009 at the University of Amsterdam for De passage naar Europa: geschiedenis van een begin (Historische Uitgeverij). This book appeared in English (The Passage to Europe: How a Continent Became a Union) (Yale University Press, 2013), French (éd. Gallimard, Bibliothèque des Idées 2012) and five other languages. It was awarded many prizes including the Socratesprijs, the D.J. Veegensprijs from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Prix du Livre Européen 2012 and the Prix Louis Marin from the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques.
Van Middelaar was the speechwriter and an advisor to the first permanent European Council President, H.A. Van Rompuy (2010-2014); he worked for the office of European Commissioner for the Internal Market F. Bolkestein (2002-2004).
Since 2015 Van Middelaar writes a weekly column for the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, which appears two-weekly in De Tijd in Belgium. He also publishes in other newspapers including Die Zeit and Le Monde.
Universiteit Antwerpen
Noel Clycq’s PhD (2007) studied the identification and socialization processes in Belgian, Italian and Moroccan origin families in Flanders and framed this within the theoretical work of Pierre Bourdieu. Between 2009-2012, he was the academic coordinator and project manager of the SBO-project 'Bet You! Boosting the Educational Trajectories of YOUth in Flanders. A study of the obstacles for and strategies of pupils with and without an immigration background in secondary education'. This interuniversitary project focused on the educational trajectories of Chinese, Flemish, Moroccan, Polish and Turkish origin students in Flanders.
During the period 2013-2018 he is involved as postdoctoral researcher in the FP7 project focusing on the issue of Early School Leaving in Europe. This project is coordinated by CeMIS (UAntwerp) and is a consortium of nine EU countries. Within this project he coordinates two work packages: The 'Theoretical and Methodological' work package, and the 'Qualitative Fieldwork and Analysis' work package.