Current projects

This project aims to understand - through a comparative approach based on numerous examples - the relationship between religion(s) - or: sacrality -, food and music in the monarchical political systems of Eurasia - from England to Japan, or, to put it otherwise: from Christendom via the Islamicate world to the Sinosphere - from the 13th till the late 18th century.

In September 2022, Jan Hein Furnée, Gerrit Verhoeven and Ilja Vandamme (Antwerp) will organise a main session at the biannual conference of the European Association for Urban History about the history of urban tourism promotion.

In this book project Brigitte Adriaensen analyses how contemporary Latin American literature uses different types of humor (black humor, parody, irony, cynicism) in the representation of violence.

This project brings together interviews from multiple stakeholders to form a holistic enquiry intersecting creative tourism practices with craft cultures.

In this book project, Maarten De Pourcq examines receptions of the ancient story of Medea in modern and contemporary culture in the broadest sense. The book explores the question of the role of classical heritage to address social and political concerns in contemporary art and culture.

In this biographical project, funded by the Nederlands Letterenfonds, Floris Meens will study the life and work of the Dutch essayist, playwright, novelist and travel author Wagenvoort (1859-1944).

In this Dutch-language book project, Maarten De Pourcq examines exemplary interactions between the ancient Greco-Roman world and the modern world. The book explores the role of classical references in the way in which modern people, roughly from the end of the nineteenth century onwards and taken from the perspective of the Low Countries, envision and shape their lives, their ambitions and their position in the world.

Classical scholarship has shown that a highly mobile culture was the norm in the ancient Mediterranean. This research focuses on the narrative strategies that are at play in the literary representation of ancient women’s travels.

This project grows out of Anna Geurts’s Dutch translation of Neel Doff’s 1921 novel Keetje trotting, which is part of Doff’s autobiographical trilogy. The project will entail an examination of the early reception of this trilogy and of Doff as a transnational author, as well as an examination of her later reception among Dutch audiences, under the influence of cross-media translations into book, film and song.

In this book, Rob van de Schoor will present and analyse the travelogues of approximately ten Dutch writers (1830-1920) who visited parts of Europe and Asia. The main focus will be the changes these authors observed in the countries they visited, due to upcoming (mass) tourism, and what happened to these regions and countries after they had left. The confrontation with a different lifestyle and the implications this had on their writings and opinion on Dutch culture will be another recurrent topic in this study.