Projects
The Road to Alexandria. The Sensation of Landscapes in European Travel Writing, 1919-1939 Vrije Universiteit Brussel
‘gazes’ on foreign people and places. Challenging the longstanding
neglect of non-visual sensations, this project will analyze the
interplay of sounds, tastes, smells, and textures in non-fictional
published travel accounts. This approach will be applied to the
sensation of arduous landscape types in Southeastern Europe and
Western ...
Towards a model for humour in nineteenth-century poetry - A conceptual study and an analysis of a growing subjectivity Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Miracle or Magic? The Figure of the 'Magos' in Byzantine Hagiography Ghent University
What is the difference between magic and miracle? Scholars today believe that it is not possible to reach clear definitions of ‘magic’ and ‘miracle’ capable of answering that question: theoretically, one cannot meaningfully differentiate between the two. However, for Christians of the first centuries and later, the distinction between magic and miracle was crucial. This does not mean they were not sensitive to the fluidity of the spheres of ...
This Is Who I Could Be: Storyworld Possible Selves and Fictionality. University of Antwerp
Widening the Net: Knowledge and the Novel in the Internet Age Ghent University
The ever-increasing availability of information, made possible by the Internet today, transforms the way people perceive and acquire knowledge. This project maps the effects of this epistemological shift in the literary form of the novel, hypothesizing that the notion of the sublime helps us understand how literary fiction dramatizes it. The sublime aesthetic, which presents the unpresentable, reflects the way the unfathomable scope of the ...
Tours on Paper. Literary Explorations of the Itinerarium in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Ghent University
Although pilgrimage characterised Christianity from its beginnings, the fourth century saw a dramatic increase of travelling to the Holy Land and Jerusalem, Constantinople, and Rome. This is reflected in a boom of "itineraria": texts describing the routes to and from the holy sites, as well as the places and monuments encountered along the way. These works did not just have a utilitarian function as a travel guide, but were also conceived as ...
The Magic Lantern and its Cultural Impact as Visual Mass Medium in Belgium (1830-1940) (B-MAGIC) University of Antwerp
Al stories: interactive narratives for hospitalised children. University of Antwerp
B-Magic. The Magic Lantern and its Cultural Impact as Visual Mass Medium in Belgium (1830-1940) KU Leuven
This project will write the as yet unwritten history of the magic lantern as a mass medium in Belgium. In doing so, it will make an essential contribution to the study of the country's cultural history as well as to international media historiography. It aims to rediscover the various functions of the lantern performance within the Belgian public sphere, in particular, its use in the transmission and negotiation of knowledge, norms and values ...