[1] Cools studied history and philosophy at the universities of Antwerp, Lille and Ghent.
[2] His thesis, on the nobility in the Burgundian and Habsburg Netherlands, was supervised by Henk van Nierop and Wim Blockmans.
[3] Cools briefly worked at Leiden University (1999-2003) and the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (2003-2006)[4] before taking up a position as a lecturer at the KU Leuven.
[2] Together with Steven Gunn and David Grummitt, he has studied war as a factor in the formation of political identities in England and the Low Countries in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.
[5] In March 2015 he was interviewed on VRT Radio 1 about the 16th-century Iconoclastic Fury in the Low Countries, to provide perspective on the destruction of cultural heritage by ISIL then in the news.