Hans Cools
Hans Cools (born 1969) is a historian of early-modern Europe. He is a professor at the KU Leuven and a senior research fellow of the Fryske Akademy. Career. Cools studied history and philosophy at the universities of Antwerp, Lille and Ghent. He was a researcher at the European University Institute in Florence and completed his doctorate at the University of Amsterdam. His thesis, on the nobility in the Burgundian and Habsburg Netherlands, was supervised by Henk van Nierop and Wim Blockmans. It charted the networks of patronage and fealty that tied the nobility to the crown. Cools  briefly worked at Leiden University (1999-2003) and the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (2003-2006) before taking up a position as a lecturer at the KU Leuven. Together with Steven Gunn and David Grummitt, he has studied war as a factor in the formation of political identities in England and the Low Countries in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In March 2015 he was interviewed on VRT Radio 1 about the 16th-century Iconoclastic Fury in the Low Countries, to provide perspective on the destruction of cultural heritage by ISIL then in the news. Hans Cools Hans