Violet Soen lectures Early Modern History at the University of Leuven. She is investigating aristocratic networks in the borderlands between France and the Netherlands in the 'long' sixteenth century. Previously, she has researched the Dutch Revolt and the sixteenth-century inquisition in the Low Countries.

After studying history in Leuven and Bielefeld, she obtained a masters degree in European Studies at the Université Catholique de Louvain. She gained her PhD in Early Modern History at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in 2008. After that she was Max Weber Research Fellow at the European University Institute in Fiesole, Italy. In the spring term of 2011, she was a visiting fellow at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

Violet Soen is member of the editiorial board of the Revue d'Histoire ecclésiastique. The Louvain Journal for Church History. She also takes part in the board of the international Reformation Research Consortium and the Flemish-Dutch Association for Early Modern History. In addition she serves as secretary for the History Section of the Koninklijke Zuid-Nederlandse Maatschappij.

Her research interests include early modern religion and state formation, especially in the Low Countries and the Spanish Empire. She is the author of a book on the sixteenth-century inquisition in the Low Countries, for which she received an award in religious history from the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts in 2004. Her dissertation on peace attempts during the Dutch Revolt (1564-1598) argues that peacemaking was carried out by noble and Habsburg representatives alike. It has been awarded with the Erik Duverger-prize 2011 for historical studies based on comprehensive archival research and is forthcoming with Amsterdam University Press.  Currently, she is researching the strategies of noble families at the border between the Burgundian-Habsburg composite state and the French monarchy from 1477 to 1632, especially during the Wars of Religion.