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
The Mamluk Sultanate was an Islamic regime that ruled over Egypt and Syria from 1250 to 1517. While the population at large was Arab and spoke Arabic, its ruling elite ...read more
In 1877 the Austro-Hungarian Hugó Meltzl warned his colleagues: “As every unbiased man of letters knows, modern literary history, as generally practiced today, is nothing but an ancillahistoriae politicae ...read more
In the beginning of 2014, a new collaborative project on the analysis of the syntax of Medieval Chinese was initiated in the framework of the Ghent Centre for Buddhist Studies ...read more