Intro
I am a cultural, intellectual, and religious historian of modern Europe, with a past life in Hebrew Bible and Semitic languages. My work now centers on the history of science: specifically, the formation and circulation of knowledge about the ancient world both in and between Europe, the Middle East, and India from 1770 to 1930.
Work
In my early research, I concentrated on historiography. Grounded in the history of biblical, classical, and oriental studies, it examined the reception of antiquity, the shadow of Protestant theology, and the complexity of Jewishness in modern writings on the ancient world. Much of it considered the scholarly practices, the institutional settings, the political views, and the religious ideals that shaped representations of early Judaism during the German Empire.
More recently, I have focused on metaphilology, exploring the science of texts. Here, I investigate philology as the premier science of the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. This work analyzes philology as an integrated system of knowledge-production: a scientific network made up of humans and objects, practices and ideas, infrastructure and technology. It studies how they worked together to collect and analyze cultural artifacts. With this line of research, I am Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant PhiSci: Philology as Science in 19th-Century Europe.
My publications appear in journals of history, religion, and culture, such as History & Theory, Critical Inquiry, and Harvard Theological Review , as well as reference works like the New Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation and Oxford History of Modern German Theology. My first monograph, on the historiography of ancient Israel in the German Empire, was published by Mohr Siebeck in 2018. The second, focused on the life, work, and letters of a forgotten historian and philosopher – and one of the last Jews to complete a doctorate in Nazi Germany – appeared with Penn State University Press in 2024.
Over the years, I have received generous research funding from, inter alia, the European Research Council, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, German Academic Exchange Service, Fulbright Program, and American Schools of Oriental Research.
Person
At Ghent, I am an Associate Research Professor in History of Science ('BOF-ZAP', since 2022). Alongside my principal appointment in the Department of History, I have worked with the Department of Philosophy & Ethics and the German Studies Section. I am also a Member of the Young Academy of Belgium and a Guest Lecturer at the University of Groningen.
Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Flemish Research Council (2019–22), Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Cambridge and Queens’ College (2017–19), and Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Göttingen (2016–17). In 2016, I earned a Dr. phil. in History at Göttingen, summa cum laude, where I first began as a Fulbright Scholar. During doctoral studies, I also held fellowships at the University of Chicago, Leibniz Institute of European History, and Max Weber Centre for Advanced Studies. This followed an MDiv at Princeton Theological Seminary.
Nice and tidy as it may seem, this streamlined biography obscures many dark nights of academic precarity. It also omits the initial rejection of numerous articles and grant proposals.
