Jarrik Van Der Biest

Jarrik Van Der Biest studied History at KU Leuven (Belgium) and obtained a master’s degree in Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds (United Kingdom). In 2024, he defended his PhD thesis, An Augustinian Revolution in the Auditorium? Michael Baius (1513-1589), as Royal Chair of Scholastic Theology and Sacred Scripture in Early Modern Louvain, on the teaching of theology at the sixteenth-century university of Leuven. His interests lie in book archaeology, early modern Catholic debates on the relationship between free will and divine grace, and university history. Currently, Jarrik is working as a postdoctoral researcher funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) at KU Leuven’s Lectio Institute for the Study of the Transmission of Texts, Ideas and Images in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. His project investigates the theological reception of René Descartes from a cross-confessional perspective, bringing together seventeenth-century material from Reformed Utrecht and Catholic Leuven.