Projects
The stylistics of contrived simplicity (apheleia) in novelistic and biographical fiction: Xenophon of Ephesus and Xenophon of Athens' Cyropaedia Ghent University
This research project is positioned on the intersection of ancient novels and biographies, two extremely and cross-culturally influential genres from (late) Antiquity. It aims to address longstanding questions of the literary nature, background and readership by adopting an innovative approach: the analysis of the construction of apheleia in novelistic and biographical narrative.
Historical biography, hagiography and the marvelous in late medieval Egypt, Syria and France: a comparative study of the diachronic use of mirabilia in the biographical traditions of Baybars, Qalāwūn, al-Nāṣir Muḥammad and Louis IX. Ghent University
This research is a comparative study of the historical biographical traditions about the Mamluk sultans Baybars, Qalāwūn and al-Nāṣir Muḥammad and the French king Louis IX. A specific focus will be on the use of mirabilia, marvelous anecdotes somewhere in between fact, fiction and hagiography which figure prominently in the biographical traditionbs of all these monarchs.
The fictional life. A narratological-rhetorical approach to characterization and fictionality in the Greek biographers in the imperial period Ghent University
This research project aims at a formal description of fictionality in ancient sophists' and philosophers' biographies (that is, non-fiction with clearly fictional characteristics) from the imperial period (1st-4th cent. AD). Therefore it develops a narratological-rhetorical analysis of character construction. This project enhances our understanding of the formal specificity of fictional and non-fictional narrative literature.