Dr. Rudy Jos Beerens

Curriculum vitae and duties

Rudy Jos Beerens has been working as a curator at the RKD since 2022. Beerens began his career as an art historian at KU Leuven, where he graduated summa cum laude in 2016 and completed his Ph.D. in 2021 with a thesis titled Painters and Communities in Seventeenth-Century Brussels: A Social History of Art in a Digital Framework. Additionally, he worked at the Rubenianum in Antwerp from 2014 to 2015 and was part of Project Cornelia – a digital art history research project at KU Leuven under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Koenraad Brosens – from 2016 until the end of 2022. Between 2019 and 2021, Beerens participated in the NA + DAH: A Getty Advanced Workshop on Network Analysis and Digital Art History, and in 2021, he was briefly affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology through the MISTI program.

Beerens’ research combines qualitative research with quantitative analysis and primarily focuses on the socio-economic backgrounds against which artists operated in the early modern Netherlands. In 2023, he received an NWO Museum Grant to study the tapestry industry in Gouda.

Publications (selection)

• with K. Brosens, B. Cardoso en F. Truyen, ‘The Brussels guild of painters, goldbeaters and stained-glass makers, 1599–1706. A prismatic analysis’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 82, 4 (2019), pp. 531-553.
• with K. Brosens, et al, ‘Slow digital art history in action. Project Cornelia’s computational approach to 17th-century Flemish creative communities’, Visual Resources 35 (2019), pp. 1-20.
• ‘The Amsterdam tapestry producer Alexander Baert (1660–1719) and his workshop. New findings’, Textile History 50, 1 (2019), pp. 41-54.