Projects
The fictional life. Rhetoric, physiognomy and characterization in the Greek biographers in the imperial period Ghent University
Physiognomic culture in popular performance: on the use of stereo-'types' in fin-de-siècle Brussels. University of Antwerp
Female Faces, Intellectual Identities. Visual and Textual Portraits of Learned Women in Early Modern Collective Biographies KU Leuven
Par excellence: italiano popolare in the 21st century KU Leuven
Par excellence: italiano popolare in the 21st century 1. Introduction: research questions and objectives This project deals with two sociolinguistic issues that have particularly challenged researchers in recent years. On a broader and theoretical sociolinguistic level, this project contributes to the current debate that centers around the notion of ‘language variety”. On a descriptive and empirical level, it wants to contribute to a strongly ...
A Face of One's Own. Author Portraits and the Construction of Female Intellectual Authority in Early Modern Europe KU Leuven
This project investigates women’s historical effort to embody intellectual authority, by analyzing portraits of learned women as agents of public image in the male-dominated European intellectual field (1550-1800).
The complex position of learned women in the early modern public sphere has been the focus of increased attention. However, recent historical studies are characterized by a strongly biographical and text-based methodology ...
Architectural Space Thought and Taught.Trading Zones of the Concept of Space, 1945-1980. KU Leuven
The body as a mirror of the soul: an inquiry into the reception of the Physiognomonica in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. KU Leuven
Medieval scholars reading (pseudo-)Aristotle’s Physiognomonica, a text dealing with the deduction of internal character traits from external features, did not read this treatise in the original Greek language, but had access to it through the Latin translation by Bartholomew of Messina (13th century). This translation (rather than the original Greek text) circulated widely in the medieval West and was instrumental in the ...
Genealogy, Genes and Generations: the Family Fiction of German and British Women Writers 1900-1945 KU Leuven
This project examines the depiction of family genealogies and generations in novels and short stories by German and British women writers from the first half of the twentieth century. This period witnessed an obsession with genealogical descent, the rise of the concept of generations and rapid progress in the field of genetics and heredity. Although women did not figure in patrilineal family trees and were underrepresented in the new ...