The 9/11-attacks and the war on terror have altered the perception of Islam in the West. Particularly those countries once associated with the rich history of Mesopotamia and Persia have become subject to an antagonizing discourse (cf. Axis of ...read more
Before the International Copyright Act of 1891 was passed, the American literary marketplace was saturated with unauthorized reprints of British texts. Neither British nor American authors had any legal claim ...read more
Provincial assemblies were a widespread phenomenon in both the eastern and western provinces of the Roman Empire. Their official function was tending to the provincial imperial cult. Research on the ...read more
In the first half of the seventeenth century natural philosophers looking for alternatives to the then dominant Aristotelian physics often took simple material objects and contrivances to offer important lessons ...read more
This project will systematically relate scripting of rituals of conflict, reconciliation and social integration to societal developments in the Central Medieval West (tenth-twelfth centuries). So far, scholarship has been determined ...read more
This project focuses on the public behavior of the secular and ecclesiastical elites of the later tenth to early twelfth centuries to investigate the competitive aspects of the Peace of ...read more
This project will offer the first comprehensive and comparative analysis of the use of speech acts, ritual acts and spatial arrangements in the construction of episcopal authority in the ‘long ...read more
In October 2013, I started a sociolinguistic-ethnographic study of pupils’ speech practices in Flanders (Belgium). From November 2013 until December 2014, I immersed myself into the daily school life of ...read more
The Pirenne Consortium for Medieval Studies is launched as one of the five SHGW (social and behavioral sciences and humanities) research consortia at Ghent University. It operates within the larger ...read more