Gillian Mathys is a social historian of the Great Lakes region. She is interested in longue durée approaches to the production of space, identities and violence. Her first monograph on the history of the Lake Kivu region is forthcoming with the African Studies Series of Cambridge University Press. She is an associate professor of African History at Ghent University (Belgium). In 2022 she received an ERC-Starting Grant for her project VIOLENCE WORK, looking for new, bottom-up ways to conceptualize colonial violence in Rwanda, Burundi and Congo. She was one of the 'experts' appointed to the parliamentary commission on Belgium’s colonial past. Her work appeared in journals such as The Journal of African History, The Journal of Peasant Studies and many others, but she also has a keen interest in producing work for larger audiences. She also enjoys her work as an editor for the bilingual journal Revue Canadienne d’Études Africaines, as well as for Afrika Focus.