Bram van Oostveldt is Associate Professor in the Department of Art, Music and Theatre Studies at Ghent University. He studied Theatre Studies and Art History at Ghent University, where he earned his PhD in 2005 with a dissertation on the concept of naturalness in eighteenth-century theatre and theatre theory.

From 2007 to 2019, he was Assistant and later Associate Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Between 2013 and 2017, he served as Senior Researcher and co-director (with Stijn Bussels, Leiden University) of the ERC project Elevated Minds: The Sublime and the Public Arts in Seventeenth-Century Paris and Amsterdam.

His work focuses on seventeenth- to nineteenth-century theatre and music theatre, often in relation to the visual arts and early modern art theory. His articles have appeared in leading journals such as Art History, Forum Modernes Theater, and Theatre Survey. He was guest editor (with Stijn Bussels) of special issues in the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art (2016) and Lias (2017).

He has authored two monographs on eighteenth-century Brussels theatre (Verloren, 2013; Academia Press, 2001) and co-editedThe Amsterdam Town Hall in Words and Images. Constructing Wonder (Bloomsbury, 2021). His forthcoming co-edited volume on the painter Antoine Wiertz (with contributions from scholars at institutions including Harvard, the Louvre, and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels) will be published in the Brepols Series XIX in 2024.

His recent co-authored monograph, The Sublime in the Visual Culture of the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic (Routledge, 2023), explores the role of the sublime in the formation of national identity in early modern Dutch visual and theatrical culture.

He is co-director of S:PAM (Studies in Performing Arts and Media) at Ghent University, a member of GEMS (Group for Early Modern Studies) and THALIA (Interplay of Theatre, Literature & Media in Performance), and editor-in-chief of Documenta. Tijdschrift voor theater.