Projects

This project aims at a systematic analysis of the presences (in different forms) of a
number of Latin literary genres in the ancient Greek novel. The driving research hypothesis is that Greek novels to varying degrees and in different ways address, respond to and make creative use of Latin narrative traditions, in order to (a) conceptualize the intertwined notions of love and heroism, and (b) develop metaliterary thoughts about the ...

The project aims to

- describe how Greek romantic novels written before 1850 relate to the adventure novel of ordeal, and expose intertextual relationships with ancient or Byzantine models;

- make text analyses to illustrate the generic pattern and the ideological functioning of the modern Greek adventure novel;

- determine how this fits in with both Greek and European Romanticism.

Viruses are the most abundant biological entities on this planet. It is estimated that if you stack all viruses present on earth on top of each other, you would create a tower that stretches 200 light years into the universe. Viruses are everywhere, including in extreme environments, such as in natural boiling geysers. Viruses isolation from these ‘hot pools’ exhibit astonishing looks reflecting an egg or bottle. The stability of these ...

Medieval romance is arguably the most influential secular literary genre of the European Middle Ages. Its history has not been written yet. In order to enhance our understanding of this history (both conceptually and cross-culturally), this project offers the first reconstruction and interpretation of the persistence of (ancient) novelistic and (late antique and medieval)hagiographical traditions in French, Anglo-Norman and English medieval ...

The novel is arguably the most popular fictional genre nowadays. Since Antiquity has not left us any straightforward, theoretical definition of fiction, this project turns to the ancient novels themselves, from which, it argues, implicit concepts and definitions of fiction can be deduced. To do so, the project proposes narratological and rhetorical analyses of the metafictional potential of novelistic trial scenes, which are not only a staple ...

Literary-technical research into Christian Greek and Latin fictional texts (fourth to sixth centuries AD) Acta Martyrum and Passiones from Late Antiquity: generic specificity compared with the ancient novel, formal analysis of narrative techniques, construction of novelistic topoi and characterization-techniques; structuralist narratology and ancient rhetoric shed new light on the tradition of veneration of the martyrs.

Catabolic breakdown of glucose through glycolysis is one the most ancient and conserved ways to fuel and maintain bioenergetic homeostasis. Both yeast and cancer cells ferment glucose to ethanol or lactate, respectively, to support vigorous cell division. Cancerous growth poses an important threat to human health as currently millions of people yearly succumb to its consequences. Fast proliferating cancer cells often rely on strong glucose ...

This project envisages for the first time a systematic, literary-rhetorical analysis of Italo-Greek hagiography, a corpus of which the prominent, narrative qualities have long been recognized but, for historical reasons of academic ideology, have never received serious scholarly attention in their own right. This corpus comprises Lives, martyr acts and encomia written in Greek between the 5th and the 13th centuries and describing the lives of ...

What is the mind and how does it relate to our body? These are central questions in today’s philosophy of mind, and they have a long history. The very concept of “mind”, as the item responsible for cognition, and the so-called “mind-body problem” are normally traced back to the philosophy of René Descartes (1597-1650) and his mindbody dualism. But were Descartes’ views solely the result of his ingenuity, or were they rather a synthesis of ...