This project focuses on the French philosopher and physicist Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655). Itexplores Gassendi’s optics and its relation to his commitment to empiricism. My aim is to propose,through Gassendi, a ...read more
Research interests: (1) Troy literature from Homer over imperial times towards the Middle Ages; (2) western romances "on the fringe" between Knight and Saint; and (3) heroic characterization.read more
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
[Project funded by the Austrian Wissenschaftsfonds (Lise Meitner-Fellowship) and carried out at the University of Vienna. This is an extension of the project "Profiling the Prince's Servants", which is temporarily ...read more
My research project at Stockholm University pertains to questions of narrative framing and other forms of multi-narrative organisation in High Medieval Latin tale compilations: how are these compilations organised and ...read more
How did early modern Europeans make sense of painful and uncanny bodily excretions? Rather than dismissing such afflictions as a nuisance to be eliminated by the ‘life sciences’, pre-modern patients ...read more
This project will investigate (a) the sociological and historical context of the late 19th & early 20thcentury history of religions, focusing on anti-Semitism in scientific networks, and (b) the depictionof ...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
This project focusses on the socialization of, and interaction between, two non-elite groups in the Roman world: freed slaves and freeborn members of the urban ‘middle class’. Scholarly interest in ...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