Announcement: GEMS Seminar: Histories and Theories of Reading. Fourth Series.

In the course of 2018, GEMS will host a number of international scholars whose work is relevant for the study of literary and other cultural artefacts and practices of the early modern period. Neema Parvini, David Marno, Zachary Schiffman, Marisa Galvez, Frans-Willem Korsten and Catherine Belsey have all accepted our invitation to participate in a series of discussions with PhD-students. The Seminar is co-funded by Ghent University’s Doctoral School of Arts, Humanities and Law.

In the course of the past years, the program of the Histories and Theories of Reading Seminar has featured, among others, Kathy Eden, Albert Ascoli, Roland Greene, Jonathan Culler, William Marx, Leah Price, Julian Wolfreys and Rodolphe Gasché.

More details about this year’s programme will be announced in the course of January 2018. The first three sessions will take place between March and June, the other three between October and December. PhD-students who want to participate in the Seminar and obtain credits for the DS-programme are required to inscribe for three out of six sessions. Expressions of interest and further inquiries can be sent to jurgen.pieters@ugent.be.

The picture is Antonello da Messina’s Saint Jerome in His Library (ca. 1475).

GEMS in portraits: Youri Desplenter

For our autumn interview, GEMS had the chance to talk with Youri Desplenter. Although in fact a medievalist, he is closely involved with GEMS because of the intricate connection between the two periods. Youri’s specialty is Middle Dutch religious and moral-didactic literature, and the relation between vernacular and Latin literature in the Middle Ages. After finishing his dissertation on the translations of Latin hymns and sequences, he did a postdoctoral research on the translations of the Psalms, and on the writings of Jan van Leeuwen († 1378). As a professor of Dutch medieval literature, Youri is also a popular teacher.