Gert Huskens is affiliated as a post-doctoral researcher to the ERC Consolidator Grant project ‘Fighting Pandemics from Below: Global North-South Public Health Cooperation in the Middle East and North Africa, 1792-1942 [COOPERATION]’ at Utrecht University. His works focusses on the presence and behavior of small states, such as Belgium and the Netherlands, in the international sanitary councils of Constantinople, Alexandria, Tangier, Tunis and Teheran. Currently, he is concentrating on the linkages between the modernization of urban infrastructure in Tangier, the expansion of Belgian industrial interests and the role of the Moroccan Sanitary Council as an inter-imperial meeting ground.

He obtained his PhD with ‘The Lion and the Sphinx. An entangled history of Belgian diplomacy in Egypt, 1830-1914’ at the Université libre de Bruxelles and Ghent University in 2023. Previously, he obtained his MA in History with distinction in 2016 and his MSc in Comparative and International Politics with distinction in 2018, both at KU Leuven.He was affiliated to the Ghent Centre of Digital Humanities where he co-developed a relational database on the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century elite of Egypt and is an active member of the New Diplomatic History Network and the Security History Network. Other research interests and publications include the global history of Belgium’s diplomatic relations in the long nineteenth century; the history of Western travelers to the Eastern Mediterranean; the social history of the Mixed Courts of Egypt, and the integration of indigenous actors in foreign diplomatic service and urban Levantine and foreign elites in late-nineteenth century Egypt.