I am a scholar of Latin literature with master degrees in Historical Literature and Linguistics as well as Gender and Diversity. I earned my PhD in literary studies from Ghent university with a study on the vision books of the medieval prophet Hildegard of Bingen. After that, I worked on a project with the Huygens Institute in Amsterdam studying the transnational impact of biblical drama from the Low Countries.

I am an assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, where I teach in the bachelor Religious Studies (Religiewetenschappen), Islam and Arabic (Islam en Arabisch), and the master programme Religion and Society (Religie en Samenleving). Next to my appointment in Utrecht, I do postdoctoral research at the University of Groningen on classical knowledge in settler colonial paradigms. 

My research centers on the intersections between literature, religion, and the production of knowledge in the medieval and early modern periods, with a focus on Latin literature. It engages with the study of gender, with performance and embodiment, and since recently with the field of settler colonial studies. 

A central term in my research is allegory, which represents the abstract through the concrete and therefore has always been a powerful tool through which religion makes visible the invisible. I have analysed the question why so many personifications are female and how their female bodies contribute to their symbolical functioning. I have also studied the allegorical universe of the twelfth-century visionary Hildegard of Bingen. This resulted in a book that came out in 2022. My book subverts assumptions about Hildegard that are based on how modern people tend to conceive of a female medieval visionary. I argued that the visions are not direct representations of an experience, but rather the outcome of a process of translating Hildegard’s unique and gendered embodied experience into a literary form that reflects the way that knowledge is produced in every human body.

Performance and embodiment are important to my research. Latin is often perceived as the abstract and disembodied language and literature of an elite. I study it as a literature that was embodied by people by looking at performative practices of literature. I have studied the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Latin drama that was written by teachers of humanist and Jesuit schools and performed by their pupils with the goal of inculcating good Latin and good morals. An ongoing research strand broadens this research to the study of dialogue and debate literature. 

Lastly, I am currently working on a project called Settler Colonial Paradigms: Classical Receptions – Territoriality - Legality – Indigeneity. Our aim is to investigate the relation of classical models (Greek, Phoenician, Roman, biblical) to practices of settler colonialism. My own focus is on Dutch colonialism in the seventeenth century. Working together with archaeologists and historians, I read neglected Latin texts that are closely linked to the colonial enterprise and explore the nature of the ties between discourses, ideologies, classification, and violence. 

I am a co-founder and the coordinator of the international research network RELICS (Researchers of Latinate Identities and Cosmopolitanism), which promotes the study of Latin literature from a diachronic viewpoint and in relation to other literatures. I am also an editor of the associated journal JOLCEL (Journal of Latin Cosmopolitanism and European Literatures).