Vera de Bel

Vera de Bel is an Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen (ICS/Department of Sociology), where she studies families as networks. She began her academic career with a PhD (2015-2019) at the same university, funded by a Talent Grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO), focusing on how parental divorce changes family networks and affects well-being. During her PhD, she collected the multi-actor dataset Lifelines Family Ties. She held postdoctoral positions at the University of Geneva (2020–2022), where she studied young adults’ social networks, at the University of Turku (2022–2023), focusing on family ties and the transition to parenthood, and at the University of Cologne (2023–2025), supported by a Walter Benjamin grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG), continuing her research on post-divorce family networks. During her time abroad, she also became a guest researcher at NIDI. Recently, she was awarded an NWO VENI grant to study step-grandparenthood and the rise of "eight-grandparent families" following the 1990s divorce peak.

Contact

Rijksuniversiteit Groningen

v.de.bel@rug.nl
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Articles by Vera de Bel

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