Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "A dead language resuscitated? Ancient Greek in early modern culture and scholarship" "Raf Van Rooy" "Latin Literature, Leuven" "Holding degrees in classics, linguistics, and early modern history, I am developing a multifaceted line of research focusing on the appropriation of the Ancient Greek heritage in early modern Europe and its impact on modern society. (1) I study the appropriation of Greek linguistic concepts such as ‘dialect’, which evolved from a philological idea in antiquity to a highly politicized notion in modern times. (2) I investigate the 16th-century teaching of Greek, focusing on recently retrieved student notes and pathways for their digital representation. (3) I analyze how Greek was used as a literary language in the early modern era, thus rehabilitating a forgotten literature. In sum, I aim to show, by means of up-to-date technology, the constitutive importance of the classical heritage for modern ideas and traditions, as well as to foster awareness of the fact that the ways in which we try to give meaning to the world bear the burden of a long and biased history." "An ancient world of manners. A multimodal approach to politeness theory through Greek documentary papyri" "Klaas Bentein" "Department of Linguistics" "This postdoc proposal aims to investigate interpersonal relationships and social interactions in Greco-Roman and Late Antique Egypt (III BCE-VII CE) through Greek documentary papyri. The research will use the linguistic framework of historical politeness, which will be applied in an innovative way, by including a multimodal dimension. In contrast to literary sources, documentary papyri provide a pivotal witness on all social classes, offering a glimpse into daily life. Moreover, since they represent originals, they can be interpreted by considering their external features. The study will focus on a selection of documentary types (private and official letters, orders, petitions, …) belonging to the city of Oxyrhynchus, one of the most important papyrological sites. It explores how politeness, apart from linguistic formulae and usages, can also be conveyed through the external characteristics of written communication, such as the material and visual aspects of a text, and even through non-verbal and non-tangible communication (e.g. gestures and expressions). The multimodal approach will reshape the traditional focus on polite linguistic conventions. Thus, the project will develop novel research trends in historical politeness and will contribute to our understanding of interpersonal (im)polite relations in the Greco-Roman and Late Antique Egyptian society." "Special Research Fund Professorship in Ancient Greek linguistics and historical sociolinguistics" "Klaas Bentein" "Department of Linguistics" "A professorship granted by the Special Research Fund is a primarily research-oriented position and is made available for excellent researchers with a high-quality research programme." "Code-switching in Neo-Latin literature during the early age of printing (ca. 1470–1550): Latin between Greek and the vernaculars in the multilingual Low Countries" "Raf Van Rooy" "Latin Literature, Leuven" "My main aim is to conduct a meticulous analysis of the literary position of Neo-Latin in the multilingual landscape of Renaissance Europe during the first century of commercialized printing, taking the Low Countries as my case study. In this area, Neo-Latin got increasing competition from other languages as vehicles of literature, thought, and supra-regional communication, especially the vernaculars and Greek. What is more, speakers and writers eagerly switched from Latin to these languages, and back again. This broad range of code- switching in humanist Neo-Latin has, however, never been studied in an encompassing fashion, and drawing up the literary landscape of the early modern Low Countries has been misguidedly focused on Latin–vernacular interactions. As such, my research program adopts new literary and sociolinguistic perspectives on humanist Neo-Latin, zooming in on Latin–Greek code-switching. My project aims to show that this widespread form of code- switching in Neo-Latin literature occurred for various reasons: literary, intellectual, social, and linguistic. I focus on three source types: (1) literary handbooks and language treatises on Latin, Greek, and the vernaculars, containing meta-comments on the literary and sociocultural position of Neo-Latin; (2) bodies of multilingual student notes from literature classes with Latin as main metalanguage; and most centrally (3) selected multilingual literary works, in order to investigate code-switching from Neo-Latin to Greek and – if present – a vernacular. I will collect my corpus of texts and their metadata in an open access database. The transcription and analyses will occur partly by means of artificial intelligence through OCR techniques and automated calculations of language interactions, developing the “tongueprint” as book-historical touchstone to assess the multilingual profile of the sources. As such, I will participate in the ongoing digital turn in Neo-Latin studies. Other scientific outputs envisaged include four peer-reviewed papers, an open access monograph, and ERC & FWO project applications." "Tracing semantic change in Greek derivational morphology: a computational, distributional-semantic approach" "Dirk Speelman" "Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics (QLVL), Leuven, Comparative, Historical and Applied Linguistics, Leuven" "The central goal of this project is to to create an accurate, corpus-driven description of derivational morphological change in Ancient Greek (8th c. BC-8th c. AD), using computational techniques. It will take advantage of a large, automatically linguistically analyzed corpus of Ancient Greek and investigate how the usage of specific morphological constructions changes over time. Unlike previous approaches, special attention will be paid to the semantics of the constructions involved, using state-of-the-art techniques (distributional semantics) to model their meaning. By investigating specific case studies, our knowledge of Greek diachronical morphology will be greatly enhanced using an unprecedented longitudinal data-driven computational methodology, while the specific methods developed will enable future researchers to study morphological change in many other languages as well." "From Chaos to Order - the Creation of the World. New Views on the Reception of Platonic Cosmogony in Later Greek Thought, Pagan and Christian." "Gerd Van Riel" "De Wulf-Mansion Centre for Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy, Research Unit of History of Church and Theology, Research Unit of Biblical Studies, Greek Studies, Leuven" "Research  on the reception of Platonic Cosmogony in Later Greek Thought, Pagan and  in Christian comments on Genesis 1 - 3." "Plutarch’s Politicians and the People: Popular Politics in the 'Parallel Lives' and the Greek Cities of the Roman Empire" "Andries Johan Zuiderhoek" "Department of History" "This project studies mass-elite relations in the Greek cities of the Roman empire by examining Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, a second-century AD collection of biographies of Greek and Roman statesmen from classical Athens to Republican Rome. Up till now, historians have explored these biographies as sources on the periods they describe, whereas Plutarch scholars have focused on their function as a programme for moral self-improvement. This project, by contrast, examines the Lives as a source on Greek city politics in Plutarch’s own day by testing the hypothesis that they were, in part, intended to instruct second-century AD politicians on how to secure the support of the people. If this hypothesis proves correct, it follows that the Lives should be re-interpreted as original evidence for the existence -contrary to received scholarly opinion- of a democratic tradition of popular political participation in the imperial Greek city. To this end, the project adopts a uniquely interdisciplinary approach that integrates the inscriptions generated by the political institutions of the imperial Greek cities and Roman-era handbooks on rhetoric and self-fashioning into a close reading of Plutarch’s Lives. The proposed research is likely to provide new insights into local power relations in the Roman empire and to advance our understanding of the ancient city as an inclusive political system, which may stimulate comparative research on popular participation in other premodern urban contexts." "Matter and soul. Greek Christian treatises on human condition from Late Antiquity, and their relation to earlier philosophical views on matter." "Caroline Macé" "Greek Studies, Leuven, De Wulf-Mansion Centre for Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy" "What was antiquarian literature in Greek antiquity? Collection of the fragments of Aristotle's Politeiai for 'FGrHist IV' with translation, commentary and syntheses" "Stefan Schorn" "Ancient History, Leuven" "The aim of this research project is to make a major contribution to our knowledge of antiquarian literature in Greek antiquity and to reassess its relation to historiography. For this purpose, the fragments of Aristotles Politeiai will be edited in critical editions, translated and commented on. This will form the basis of a reconstruction of the authors working method and of the leading principles characterizing this work, which will enable us to explore its relation  to other forms of historical literature and erudition." "'Ad fontes!' in the Classroom: Teaching Latin, Greek, and Hebrew Texts in the Early Modern Southern Low Countries" "Raf Van Rooy, Jan Papy" "Latin Literature, Leuven" "Whereas the spread of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew texts in the Renaissance has been extensively studied, the didactic praxis involved in teaching these languages and their literatures at European universities and institutes has not yet met with systematic and in-depth focused research. Studying the teaching practices used in the early modern auditoria is, however, quintessential to a correct understanding of the transmission of linguistic and literary knowledge, to university history, and the impact of the new linguistic education on intellectual history. In this project, the teaching of the three ‘sacred’ languages is investigated through detailed case studies - starting from the Louvain Collegium Trilingue and from unique student notes in extant text books - and is framed in its broader European context. By relying on largely neglected primary sources and an innovative methodology it can be shown how ‘revolutionary’ the humanist linguistic education, especially that at the renowned Collegium Trilingue, actually was."