What are you going to work with at IFIKK?
I'm going to be working on my Marie Curie project MigraLing, which investigates the interaction between the process of migration and progress in language studies during the Renaissance, roughly 1390-1600, but with a focus on the crucial first hundred years. More in particular, I will study how Byzantine migrants who fled from their crumbling empire to more western parts of Europe, especially Italy, contributed to the development of an embryonic contrastive-comparative approach to language after a long period of Latin-centered grammar. A crucial context for this development was teaching, as Byzantine scholars were forced to use Latin as a metalanguage when teaching Greek to their western pupils, mostly male but with occasional pioneering female students. With this project, I will be able to extend my main specialism, the history of linguistics, to include
Can you tell us a bit about your research interests?
Trained as a classicist, linguist, and historian, I’m fascinated by the ways in which the classical Greek language and literature have left a profound impact on our western society, in general, and three aspects, in particular: (1) linguistic ideas, (2) education, and (3) literature. (1) I have conducted a very thorough analysis of the concept of dialect and its long history from antiquity to the present day, especially in relation to the concept of language. Other linguistic concepts of Greek origin I have studied include aorist, article (the part of speech), and dual. (2) I research student notes taken during classes of Greek language and literature in the early modern Low Countries, especially the Three-Language College in Leuven in the sixteenth century, foundational for the anchoring of classical education in the Low Countries. (3) I investigate literature in Ancient Greek written by authors from the Low Countries during the Renaissance and after. This New Ancient Greek literature, although constituting a vast corpus, has barely been studied thus far, which I'm trying to remedy.
What do you like to do in your spare time?
I love table tennis, football, jogging, hiking, biking, and reading, but most of my time is now absorbed by my lovely twin boys. I also have two cats who often steal the Zoom-show. I used to play music until I finally realized that I lacked talent.