GEMS in portraits: Annemieke Romein

If there is someone who is not afraid to cross geographical and disciplinary borders, it’s Annemieke Romein, whose research on legislation texts in the seventeenth century has not only brought her from the Netherlands to Ghent, it also took her to Germany, Switzerland, and from the archives to the digital humanities. Annemieke completed her studies and PhD at Erasmus University Rotterdam and is currently a NWO Rubicon-fellow working at the UGhent Department of History. Additionally, she is Researcher-in-Residence at the National Library (KB) in The Hague working with digital humanities methods to improve the searchability of early modern legislation texts. Over a coffee in the Vooruit, we discussed how vital it is to conduct comparative research, and how energizing interdisciplinary work can be.

Handwritten ‘vorstelijke ordonnantie’ from Flanders ca. 1619 (RAG_GW8_RvV_772)

GEMS in portraits: Andrew Bricker

This week, I sat down with Andrew Bricker to talk about his research, his work at UGent and his forthcoming book about satire and defamation law; we ended up talking a lot about our shared astonishment at Belgian traffic behaviour and the things we have come to love about Ghent. As an assistant professor in English Literature, Andrew is an expert on satire from the early modern period, but his interests extend to material culture and cognitive approaches to reading. After having studied and worked in Toronto, Prague, Stanford, Montreal and Vancouver, Andrew finally settled in Ghent last year. Now he is sharing his excitement about “old books” with Flemish students (“who are really great, but don’t talk very much – yet when they do talk they have very interesting things to say!”), working on his book Libel and Lampoon: Satire in the Courts, 1670-1792, and learning Dutch (which goes “heel goed!”) while exploring Belgium on his bike on the weekends. 

GEMS Seminar: Atelier with with Renée Vulto and Fabio della Schiava (25 January, 10-12 AM)

Thursday, 25 January, 10-12 AM, Faculty Library Arts and Philosophy, Magnel wing, Room “Freddy Mortier”.

Fabio della Schiava (UGent / KU Leuven): Toward a critical edition of Biondo Flavio’s Roma instaurata. 

Published in 1446 by Biondo Flavio, one of the most distinguished historians of the Italian Quattrocento, Roma instaurata is an account in Latin of the archeological remains of ancient and christian Rome. Because of its centrality both for scholars of Humanism and Archeology, Roma instaurata has been repeatedly published between the Fifteenth and the Twenty-first century but still lacks a critical edition able to provide the reader with a reliable text and a better knowledge of Biondo’s antiquarian methodology. This edition has been now partially accomplished thanks to a 3 years project sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and undertaken at Bonn University. The paper aims to share the results of this research with a focus on the philological problems which have been encountered and the applied methodology to solve them.

Renée Vulto (UGent): Singing Communities – Dutch political songs and the performance of national identity (1775-1825)

This PhD project investigates how songs can have contributed to the development of a national consciousness in the Northern Netherlands in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. At this time, national thinking just began to develop and was particularly hard to define in a culturally fragmented region like the Netherlands that went through severe economic, political and social crisis. Songs were in Early Modern discourse seen as effective tools to strengthen the formation of collective identities. Therefore, they are in this research not considered as mere textual and musical representations of an ideology, but as scripts for performance that produce collective identification. The focus is on the possible tensions between songs as attempts to create feelings of national belonging and unity on the one hand, and the realization of these aims in the harsh reality of political and social instability.

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GEMS-Seminars

The GEMS Seminars provide the opportunity to members of our research group and other scholars with an interest in the early modern period to meet and discuss current research issues. In the schedule on our website (gemsugent.wordpress.com) you will find two categories of these meetings. First there are the Ateliers during which GEMS-members or guests present their research projects, recent publications or ideas for future projects. Who is interested to spotlight his or her current or future research projects during one of these meetings are cordially invited to get in contact with the organization (cornelis.vanderhaven@ugent.be). Secondly we will have two meetings with specialists of the early modern period who will introduce to you the work of a famous scholar by whom they are inspired in their own scholarly work (Inspired by…). GEMS-members do not need to register for the seminars. Colleagues with an interest in the early modern period who are not a member of GEMS can join us too (after a short notice to: cornelis.vanderhaven@ugent.be, because of the limited space in the reserved rooms).