Projects
Performances of the Otherworldly : Supernatural Science at the Fair in North-Western Europe (1850-1930). University of Antwerp
Otherworldly Powers? Narrative Functions of the Supernatural in Flemish and Congolese Literature before and after Congo’s Independence (1945-1975) Ghent University
Between 1945 and 1975, magical powers, curses and transcendent visions played a decisive role in Flemish literature about Congo, shaping the narrative and evoking different worldviews. Impossible phenomena in science fiction or fantastic literature have similar functions, but, unlike these genres, the supernatural elements in the Flemish literature about Congo have a religious undertone. This is explained by the strong missionary presence of ...
Beatitudo Imperfecta: An Anthology of the Concept in Aquinas and Renaissance Thomism (c. 1550 – c. 1650) KU Leuven
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) famously distinguishes between perfect and imperfect happiness. Both types of happiness lie in the perfection of human nature, but perfect happiness is possible only in the afterlife through the vision of God’s essence, whereas imperfect happiness is possible even in this life, be it through intellectual virtue and the contemplative life or moral virtue and the active life. This life’s imperfect happiness is the ...
The political weight of carrying Christ's wounds. Stigmatics in Europe, c.1800-1950. University of Antwerp
Miracles of the Mind. Evolutions in the representation of religious behaviour and the perception of the sacred in the Low Countries (1350-1750). University of Antwerp
The Historical Development of the Concept of Natural Beatitude in the Salamanca School of the Sixteenth Century (1500–1620) KU Leuven
The Aesthetics of Health and Illness in the Works of Vernon Lee KU Leuven
The project shall examine how the binary of health and illness is featured in the unfairly overlooked oeuvre of Violet Paget/Vernon Lee (1856 – 1935) with the objective of situating her writing in the contemporary discourses revolving around science, aesthetics, ethics and cosmopolitan identity. The complex intertwinements of the supernatural encounter, national identity and disease, and the aesthetic experience of the beautiful and health in ...
'Trembling Curiosity': The Naturalizing of Religion in the Early Modern Period University of Antwerp
Social Cognition and the emergence of institutions KU Leuven
John Searle has famously developed a theory of institutions, of which money, property and marriage are prime examples. The order of explanation in his theory is that a codified institution helps generating particular institutional facts which are usually marked out by status markers: public signs (‘status markers’) indicate that this is my property, or that this counts as money, or that they are married. The problem is ...