Bio
Jeroen De Gussem (* 1993) is Doctor in History and Literary Studies (interdisciplinary PhD, November 2019), currently stationed as FWO-funded senior postdoctoral fellow at the History Department of Ghent University. He is specialized in stylometry (computational modelling of writing style), and the Latin literature and the cultural history of the High Middle Ages (tenth-twelfth centuries) for England, the Low Countries, France and Germany. He uses digital analysis of style to explore questions of medieval authorship and attribution, pre-modern intellectual networks and literary collaboration both on a small and large scale, the mobility and translatability of Latin style in the Middle Ages, and prosodic and musical aspects of medieval Latin prose style in a performative context.
A main ambition of his work is to build bridges between divergent fields of expertise by combining them in his own work, especially the application of computer science to the study of pre-modern literature(s).
He currently works on a postdoctoral project "Stylometry for Aurality in Medieval Anglo-Latin Hagiography (900–1150): Performance, Community and Musicality" (2023-2026), funded by the FWO (Flemish Research Foundation).
Research Career
Jeroen De Gussem graduated as Master in Linguistics and Literary Studies in Latin-English (Ghent University, 2011–2015), during which time he was momentarily an international exchange student at the University of Kent (Canterbury, 2013). He became Doctor of History and Literary Studies after completion of his PhD-project Collaborative Authorship in Twelfth-Century Latin Literature. A Stylometric Approach to Gender, Synergy and Authority (2015–2019), made possible by the Special Research Fund at Ghent University (BOF), the expertise housed at University of Antwerp's Literary Department and CLiPS, and the generous partnership of the Corpus Christianorum Library & Knowledge Centre. Under the guidance of an interdisciplinary supervisory team consisting of Jeroen Deploige (Ghent University), Wim Verbaal (Ghent University) and Mike Kestemont (University of Antwerp), he defended his doctoral dissertation (open access) in November 2019.
Since his defense, Jeroen has successfully applied for two FWO-funded postdoc projects. From 2020–2023, he worked as postdoc junior on the project "Cross-Channel Stylistic Exchanges: A Stylometric Approach to the Impact of Mobility and Multilingualism on Medieval Latin Literature, 1000–1150," and from 2023–2026 as postdoc senior on the project "Stylometry for Aurality in Medieval Anglo-Latin Hagiography (900–1150): Performance, Community and Musicality." In the course of his career, Jeroen published on the intersection of stylometry and the Latin Middle Ages in journals such as Speculum, Interfaces, Revue Mabillon, and Parergon, and wrote book chapters in series covering the literature of the Middle Ages published by Routledge and Oxford University Press. He has given presentations and lectures on this topic on multiple occasions across the world.
Affiliations and Research Stays
Jeroen De Gussem is one of the initiators of the international scientific research network "Literatures without Borders," bringing together 16 research units from across the world for the historical-comparative study of transnationalism in the Arabic, Greek-Byzantine, Hebrew-Yiddish-Ladino and Latin literary traditions. The network, in which he is involved as active board member, is funded by the Research Foundation–Flanders (FWO) for the duration of five years (2021-2026). He is also board member of the SRN's steer unit, RELICS (Researchers of European Literary Identity, Cosmopolitanism and the Schools), and editor, copy-editor and typesetter for its open-access journal JOLCEL (Journal of Latin Cosmopolitanism and European Literatures). Finally, he is an active member of the Ghent HPIMS Henri Pirenne Institute, an interdisciplinary research consortium bringing together experts on the Middle Ages from the humanities, social sciences and STEM. In 2017, he was affiliated with the Computational Linguistics & Psycholinguistics (CLiPS) group at the University of Antwerp during a six-month research stay. In August-September 2022, he was honorary research associate (HRA) at the University of Cambridge affiliated to the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic (ASNC).
Teaching (at Ghent University)
- Narratology and Discourse Analysis, BA3 (A004001) - History Department (2020–2024)
- Latin Poetics: Middle Ages, MA (A002572) - Department of Literary Studies (formerly, 2020–2022)
Outreach
With his research on the disputed love letters of Heloise and Abelard, Jeroen was one of the 8 finalists of the Flemish PhD Cup 2020. He has (co-)written a number of popularizing articles on the heated authenticity debate in De Standaard, Eos Wetenschap and on VRT Taal.
