I am an ERC postdoctoral research fellow, part of the ERC project PhiSci: Philology as Science in 19th-Century Europe. Before coming to Ghent, I was trained in history and classical languages at the Free University of Berlin (BA 2016, MA 2018) and at the University of Oxford (DPhil in Classical languages and literatures, 2022), where I was awarded a Conington Prize (2025) by the Classics Faculty for my dissertation on Quintilian's Institutio oratoria.
My first book, Reading Quintilian. Didactic Authority in the Institutio oratoria, was published with Oxford University Press in February 2025 (reviewed in BMCR and JRS).
In the PhiSci project, I engage with the history of Classical philology in early 19th-century Germany, setting philological techniques against the backdrop of the theoretical debates surrounding them and of the multi-national scholarly networks practicing them. I am currently writing a critical biography of Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824), a founding figure in the history of philology. It starts from the question how Wolf himself and certain aspects of his life and work became canonical in disciplinary memory, whereas others were forgotten, and why. With one article (Classical Receptions Journal, 2025) already out, I show the forgotten substratum of Latin learning in his epoch-making programmatic essay Darstellung der Alterthums-Wissenschaft. Another, 'Timely or Timeless? Debates on the Language of Scholarship ca. 1800', recovers Wolf’s engagement in debates on Latin as a language of scholarship in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and will feature in a volume I am co-editing with Paul Michael Kurtz: Philology in Europe Before and After 1800: Change and Continuity.
Forthcoming in 2026 are also an article on the founding of the Erlangen philological seminar by Christoph Gottlieb Harles (1738–1815) in Antike und Abendland, which I started writing in 2025 during a two-month fellowship at the Interdisciplinary Centre for European Enlightenment Studies (IZEA) in Halle, Saale, a book chapter on Ovid, Ex Ponto 2.9, and a Der Neue Pauly entry on the reception of antiquity in 19th-century music.
