Borderland(s) in motion: Borders, mobility and history in the Lake Kivu region Ghent University
Historical research on and about the border between Rwanda and the DRC (ca. 1880-1962)
Historical research on and about the border between Rwanda and the DRC (ca. 1880-1962)
This project deals with the various multilingual social networks in the commercial towns in the County of Flanders and the Duchy of Brabant during the Late Middle Ages (1380-1500). The Burgundian Low Countries were multilingual in their speaking and writing culture. So far, literary and historical scholarship has been rather one-dimensional in its approach towards multilingualism in literature, focusing predominantly on place or cultural ...
This project aims to get a better understanding of the social history of Indian philosophy. For this purpose, this project will investigate the history of philosophy at Nalanda, the most important centre of knowledge in early medieval South Asia. Even though many classical philosophical texts from South Asia have been edited and translated in the previous century, our understanding of the social history of Indian philosophy is very limited. ...
This project starts out from the insight that a tension exists in Peruvian transitional justice practices between indigenous survivors, the state and NGOs. As a hypothesis I state that this tension is shaped by, among other factors, the collision between transitional justice’s search for closure on the one hand, and the presence of the past felt by survivors of violent conflict on the other hand.
contrast to other Germanic languages, Present-day English systematically marks progressive aspect, using BE Ving (e.g. ‘we are eating’). In this, English now behaves typologically as an unbounded language. While BE Ving and its recent rise and grammaticalization have attracted much attention in the literature, little is known about other means of expressing progressive aspect in English, and how the rise of BE Ving affected these. These ...
The cross-talk between genomics and humanities in the last decade has revitalized the interdisciplinary study of human past and enables us to address now ever wider range of questions about migration, social structure and health of our ancestors. We can ask questions about them that could not be answered before. While ancient DNA studies have substantially changed our perspectives on European Neolithic and Bronze Age, less progress has been ...
Many linguists believe that the language of our Indo-European ancestors had a considerable number of verbs which may appear both in intransitive and transitive constructions with no formal change in the verb, as in the case of English "The door opened" ~ "John opened the door" or Dutch "De sleutel draait in het slot" ("The key turns in the lock") ~ "Jan draait de sleutel in het slot" ("John turns the key in the lock"). Such verbs are called ...
(1) If I were you,… (2) I should (have) know(n). (3) If only she had listened. These constructions are counterfactuals. They speculate about an unrealizable state of affairs based on an unrealized condition. Every language has these expressions but in varying forms. Counterfactuals originate from formerly non-counterfactual expressions through semantic bleaching, phonological reduction etc. in a grammaticalization cycle. Cross-linguistic ...
This project aims to systematize the contemporary, increasingly influential movement named ‘Transcendental Materialism’ (‘TM’) by philosopher Adrian Johnston. Associated with, among others, Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou, this philosophy eclectically draws from German idealist, psychoanalytical, and Marxist traditions. Recent scholarship shows that TM, despite earlier attempts at systematization, is currently still unable to reflect on its key ...