Siegfried Evens

I am a historian, specialised in the history of risk and disaster. My broader research interests relate to history of technology, energy history, risk, disaster studies, international and transnational history, European integration, Belgian political history, fire safety, mining history, and last but not least: nuclear history.

I graduated in 2016 as Master of Arts in History at the University of Leuven, Belgium.
My Master's thesis researched the political impact of the fire in department store 'A l'Innovation' in Brussels in 1967, examining  the role of the disaster in the broader politics of prevention in Belgium on the one hand, and the theoretical relevance of Disaster Studies for political history and vice versa on the other. This Master's thesis was published as a monograph in 2017 as'De brand in de Innovation: de ramp die Belgiê veranderde'.

I am actively engaged in the popularisation and valorisation of my research and history in general. My research on the Innovation fire featured in national newspapers and TV-broadcasts in Belgium and the Netherlands. I also contributed to the organisation of the official 50-year commemmoration of the disaster in 2017. In addition, I regularly write opinion pieces and analyses for Belgian news outlets, for example on fire safety in the Grenfell Tower or the Notre Dame, mining risks, and nuclear safety. I also give lectures to broader audiences and preventionists. Finally, I obtained an Academic Teacher Degree at KU Leuven in 2017, conducting multiple teaching internships and participating in a research project on multilingual and diverse teaching contexts.

I currently am a doctoral researcher and candidate at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). My PhD-project holds the provisionary working title 'Streams, Steams, and Steels: A History of Nuclear and Non-Nuclear Risk Regulation (1850s-1990s)'. In my PhD dissertation, I show how the risks of water-and steam technologies in nuclear reactors in the U.S., France, and Sweden were increasingly governed in a nuclear, exceptional way.
This project is a part of the NUCLEARWATERS-project, which tends to rewrite the history of nuclear energy with a focus on water. As part of my research, I was a visiting scholar at Virginia Tech in 2022.