The Ghent Centre for Late Antiquity gathers various group and individual research projects which are supported by the European Research Council (ERC), the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) and the UGent Special Research Fund (BOF).
Department of Archaeology
- Zooming in on climate and societal change in central Italy (1st–6th century CE) (BOF, 2021 – 2024)
- Back to the roots. Agroforestry and the rediscovery of Roman viticulture (FWO, 2019 – 2022)
- Local communities between the cracks of history. Changing traditions, materiality and regional networks in the (former) Roman North during the 5th century (BOF, 2021 – 2023)
Department of History
- The Church, the desert, and the mountains: the social organization of Miaphysite communities from the 6th century to early Islamic rule (8th century) (FWO 2023-2025)
- Every thunder means something. Meteorology, culture and the self in late antiquity (2023-2026)
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Under pressure: the impact of socio-economic and institutional dynamics on the late Roman aristocracy (565-641) (BOF, 2022-2026)
- Thomas of Marga and the Book of Superiors: texts, formation and socio-cultural context of an East-Syrian bishop in the mid-ninth century (FWO, 2022-2026)
- ‘A learned and eloquent man, fluent in our language and in that of the Armenians’. John bar Andreas (d. 1155) and Syro-Armenian polemics in the 11th and 12th centuries (FWO, 2021 – 2024)
- This story may provide proof. History and authority in Syriac excerpt collections and beyond (BOF, 2020 – 2024)
- Decision processes in late antiquity. Networking, persuasion, presentation and governance in the Council Acts of Chalcedon, 451 (FWO, 2020 – 2023)
- Political assassination in the Late Roman Empire. Towards a new approach to studying state power and weakness in ancient Europe and the mediterranean (FWO, 2020 – 2023)
- Basil of Caesarea: Networking, lobbying and self-presentation in his letters and letter collection (BOF, 2019 – 2023)
- Libanius’ recommendation letters (2018 – 2023)
- The emperor’s ear. Lobbying and networking at the Roman imperial court during the principate (BOF, 2019 – 2022)
- Lobbying in late antiquity. Letters, networks and decision processes, 4th – 5th c. A.D. (BOF, 2017 – 2022)
Department of Linguistics
- Performative patterns in the history of Greek (500 BCE – 600 CE) (FWO, 2023-2026)
- In the mind of the scribe. An integrated sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic approach to orthographic variation and change in the Greek language of the papyri (FWO, 2022 – 2025)
- Transitivity oppositions in a diachronic typological perspective. Labile verbs in the history of the Indo-European languages (FWO, 2021 – 2025)
- The Latin cooking language (2021 – 2025)
- The Aeolodoric theory. A paradigm for Ancient Greek linguistic approaches (FWO, 2021 – 2024)
- Tracing change and reaction in the Latin tense system. An empirical analysis of language-internal and language-external influences on the development of morphological innovations and form-function pairings from Early Latin to Early Romance (FWO, 2021 – 2024)
- An ancient world of manners. A multimodal approach to politeness theory through Greek documentary papyri (BOF, 2021 – 2024)
- Everyday writing in Graeco-Roman and late antique Egypt, I – VIII AD. A socio-semiotic study of communicative variation (ERC, 2018 – 2024)
- Counterfactuals in Ancient Greek. Pragmatics, life cycles and connected pathways (FWO, 2019 – 2023)
- Relative complexity. A historical-sociolinguistic study of relative clauses in Greek documentary papyri, I-VIII AD (FWO, 2019 – 2023)
- Chaos before order? A quantitative approach to variation in the Arabic papyri, 7th-9th centuries AD (FWO, 2019 – 2023)
- The contribution of inscriptional evidence for the analysis of the vulgar Latin vowel system (ranging from the republican age to the proto-romance period). Rome and Italy, a comparative study (FWO, 2018 – 2022)
Department of Languages and Cultures
Department of Literary Studies
- Late or Too Late? Old Age in the late Latin Elegies of Maximian (6th c. AD) (FWO, 2022-2026)
- Byzantine literature, especially epistolography, history of performance, performativity and representation of gender in literature (FWO, 2022-2026)
- Nothing but the Truth? Rhetoric and Fictionality in Ancient Greek and Latin Novels (FWO, 2022-2026)
- Monstrosity in Claudian (2022-2026)
- The Making of the Second Sophistic: Literary Periodization as an Intellectual and Cultural Construct (FWO, 2022-2025)
- Interconnected texts. A graph-based computational approach to Byzantine paratexts as nodes between textual transmission and cultural and linguistic developments (BOF, 2021-2026)
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The Holy Romance. Characterization and concepts of fiction in Italo-Greek hagiography (FWO, 2021-2024)
- Miracle or magic? The figure of the ‘magos’ in Byzantine hagiography (FWO, 2020-2024)
- Novel Echoes. Ancient Novelistic Receptions and Concepts of Fiction in Late Antique and Medieval Secular Narrative from East to West (ERC, 2019-2024)
- David, our Orpheus. Reception, rewritings and adaptations of the psalms in Byzantine poetry (FWO, 2018-2022)