This research seeks to gain a better historical understanding of the coexistence of communal land systems with processes of global land commodification through which land access and control is standardized ...read more
Several hundred examples of the writings of Jacob of Serugh (d. 521) are preserved in the original Syriac language, but he was equally popular among other confessional communities of the Christian ...read more
As a crossroads between three continents, the Middle East has always been a complex contact zone for intercultural relations. Dating back to the Bronze Age, when the first 'international' contacts ...read more
The Khoisan of Southern Africa have faced violent dispossession and assimilation alongside several others into the racial group ‘coloured’ during colonialism and apartheid. Many today no longer consider the Khoisan ...read more
My research deals with the relation between the languages Kikongo and Lingala and the way the opposition between them has been activated throughout the history of the Congolese capital (1950s-present ...read more
This project focuses on the observance and organization of women religious in the central Middle Ages (9th-11th centuries) to investigate female monasticism as a deliberately "ambiguous" form of social and ...read more
This project systematically relates scripting of rituals of inclusion and exclusion to societal developments in the Central Middle Ages (10th-12th centuries). So far, scholarship in this field has relied on ...read more
This research looks into the role and impact of the Internet in reproducing and adapting religion in transnational contexts, through a case study of a South Asian religious tradition, namely ...read more