Current projects

This project envisions to enrich the study of classical archaeology and ancient history, and more widely, the field of cultural heritage studies by offering new insights into the Acropolis as an important symbol of cultural heritage.

The ancient Greeks and Romans were great innovators, not only in the realm of technology but also in other human domains, such as literature, politics and religion. How did those innovations take place? How did people come to accept these innovations? A consortium of Dutch classicists from the universities of Amsterdam, Groningen, Leiden, Nijmegen and Utrecht investigate this in a ten-year program that is hosted by Radboud University. The premise of the program is that in successful innovations people perceive a meaningful coherence between the new and the old. For this multifaceted phenomenon OIKOS uses the concept ‘anchoring’. OIKOS develops this concept in an investigation of Greco-Roman antiquity and its reception in modern times. This will result in a new and better understanding of innovation processes in antiquity but also in our own time.

This PhD project explores the persistent tension between classical scholarship and the democratisation of classical literature in the twentieth century, by studying the history and development of the international book series that tried to bridge this gap: the Loeb Classical Library (LCL).

Shortly after the assasination of Caligula, senatorial authors used the medium of historiography to start their character assassination, depicting him as an insane psychopath. This study asks what could happen with the dark picture of Caligula and his reign if analysed from non-literary sources.

This PhD research project studies the ostensible dichotomy between tradition and innovation in the portrayal of women in Hellenistic poetry, using the framework of anchoring innovation.

This large project aims at translating and briefly annotating all extant letters by the great Roman politician, orator, and author Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43).

This project investigates how the value of coins was created in different parts of the Italian peninsula through various strategies and practices of coin production and use.

This project develops a new approach that combines longitudinal historical analysis with an innovative interdisciplinary theoretical framework to show how traditions formed constraints in presenting Roman rule. This will make it possible to recognize the multidimensional framework within which Roman rulership took shape. The project covers the period from 50 BCE to 565 CE, thus including the beginning of imperial power, major transformations, and the last attempt to Roman re-unification.

This project aims at presenting a bilingual edition of two crucial early Christian texts from the late 2nd century in the genre of martyr acts: the Acta Martyrum Scillitanorum and the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis. Of both a Latin text will be given, based on recent editions (Hunink 2021 and Heffernan 2012), as well as a Greek translation dating from late antiquity. Both versions will be faced by new, modern translations in English, and a fair amount of annotation. The edition is due to be published in the series Brepols Library of Christian Sources (BLCS), edited by prof. T. O’Loughlin.

This project analyses fanfiction as a type of reception, to see how Antique motifs are reused and given new meanings in fanfiction contexts. The project examines this reception on three levels: the representations of Antique motifs in fanfiction itself, the reception of this fanfiction in online reviews from the fan community, and the relationship between fanfiction and published literature that represents Antiquity.