A history of infrastructure in Semitic philology.
This subproject examines the disunities of philological practice. Focused on biblical philology, it considers the motivations and the mechanisms of epistemic transfer. The inquiry centres on the study of Classical Hebrew in Central Europe, concentrating on comparative linguistics, textual criticism, and historical criticism. By studying debates over grammatical interpretation, procedures for textual interpretation, and protocols of textual editing, it reveals the gaps and tensions that philologists had to overcome in building their knowledge of the Hebrew Bible in its creation and transmission.
The project makes two central arguments. It claims, firstly, that academic subcultures within philological science circulated technical procedures, conceptual guides, and explanatory devices, which entailed no exact, proportionate transfer but involved an adaptation in the object exchanged, whether its implications or its epistemic status. It contends, secondly, that such transfers served to suspend or rationalize difference: in the array of material (manuscripts, languages, sources), the heterogeneity of data (both ancient and medieval documents, original Hebrew and Greek translation alike, legal as well as historical genres), the miscellany of media (penned, inscribed, transcribed, printed), the range of institutions (universities, academies, societies, seminaries), the array of training (nationally, geographically, disciplinarily), and the diversity of religion (Jewish and Protestant, orthodox and liberal).
Collaborator: Paul Michael Kurtz (PI)
A history of canon-building in Classical philology.
This subproject studies processes of canon-building in the history of classical philology in Germany. Since the nineteenth century, a core set of scholars, controversies, methodological innovations, and publications has been consistently upheld as key to the discipline’s development. One such scholar is Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824), who played a key role in the ascent of philology in Germany and was celebrated already during his lifetime as the founder of a ‘modern’ way of studying antiquity. Focusing on Wolf and his network, this project addresses a set of larger questions concerning disciplinary memory and canonisation: how does success among contemporaries and posterity alike materialise, why are certain figures, texts, and debates remembered, and why do some scholars like Wolf become, so to say, inescapable and thus canonical in the way in which a discipline narrates its own story. To do so, the subproject on the one hand studies Wolf’s reception history after his death. On the other, it goes beyond his main achievements as passed down in disciplinary history to restore a fuller picture of the historical figure. Studying the lesser-known aspects of Wolf’s life as a scholar – including for instance elements of his philological practice and institutional engagement – the subproject also grants a study on the shadow side of canonization, collective forgetting.
Collaborator: Laura Loporcaro (Postdoc)
A history of media in Indo-Iranian philology.
The sub-project investigates the transformation of physical artifacts into stable, standardized data through processes of copying, collecting, archiving, circulating, and printing.
The research approaches the history of media on two levels: (1) the theoretical questions on data collection and storage—such as what data are, how they can be preserved and organized, and their usage and circulation—, and (2) the historical record of scholarly assessment of data, improved techniques, and research networks.
The focus of the research is on the long nineteenth century, retracing the history of British, German, French, and Belgian scholarship.
The case studies that I have addressed so far include:
- August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Devanagari font to print Sanskrit and his Indian printing press. Probably the best expression of his cosmopolitanism, Schlegel’s font, funded by the Prussian government but created in Paris, represented the hermeneutic bridge between ancient Indian texts and contemporary European erudite society.
- The dynamics of philological knowledge building through epigraphic collections in the nineteenth century. The study, based on Indo-Iranian epigraphy as case study, explores the materiality of epigraphic objects, but shifts the focus from inscribed materials to material copies. I argue that the objects of nineteenth-century Indo-Iranian epigraphy were the copies of inscriptions, no longer the inscriptions themselves. The reproductions of texts and artifacts by drawings, paper squeezes, and photography, were a lens through which the materiality of the inscribed objects was standardized, collected and stored. This was also the point at which philology came into play. Philological methods, which were still being shaped in the nineteenth century, found a place in epigraphy, which was still based on tentative intuition and circumstantial situations—within a network of practices, collaborations, and colonial dynamics.
- Printing in nineteenth-century Mumbai within the Parsi community, and how this influenced the study and teaching of the Zoroastrian languages, Avestan and Pahlavi. Parsi and European scholars collaborated to build a new philological approach to Zoroastrian texts, while their tradition had been mainly transmitted orally in traditional religious schools. The European model, still in the making, was adopted but adapted by the Parsi scholars, who published grammars, coursebooks, and manuals of ritual instructions in Gujarati, their mother tongue, via Parsi printing presses.
- The forthcoming workshop “The End of Philology: Its Aims, Fates, and Limits between the Nineteenth Century and Present Day” (11th-12th June 2026, co-organised with Paul M. Kurtz and the team) explores the continuity of philological practices from the nineteenth century to the contemporary digital era.
All these studies include both the technical aspect of building and implementing tools and the socio-political dynamics of colonialism and relationships between India, Iran, and Europe. The investigation of relationships between types of expertise, scholars in the field and in European libraries, and private vs. national institutions, represents another essential element for tracing the history of media in nineteenth-century Indo-Iranian philology.
Collaborator: Martina Palladino (Postdoc)
The Royal Historical Commission and its history.
This sub-project interrogates the intersection of scientific aims of philology with nation-building in 19th century Belgium by investigating the source-publications of the Royal Historical Commission. Through a study of the editions this institute produced of primarily medieval material, the selection, compilation and construction of a national patrimony is examined. This research approaches the history of philology in a twofold manner:
On the one hand, it dives in on the different source-types that the Royal Historical Commission prioritized. These are first and foremost its editions of chronicles, cartularies and charters. By taking up each of these source-types, this dissertation aims to gain improved insight in how the editorial practices in relation to their sources developed over the stretch of the Commission’s foundation until the outbreak of World War I.
On the other hand, the project seeks to offer an increased understanding of how these editions functioned in society at large. This concerns the underlying presuppositions driving the uses of the past and the role they played in the construction of a modern sense of the nation, but also how the Commission’s editions functions as tools or technologies to facilitate and solidified such nationhood. Finally, the societal function of scholarly editions is scrutinized through a study of the dissemination of the Commission’s textual production by way of education: in order to counter the idea that the hefty editions were destined to end up on bookshelves to gather dust, the project considers how its members played an active role in the changing notions of how philological activity and use of its tools should be encouraged and taught in the class room.
Collaborator: Christian Hoekema (Predoc)
A history of Chinese printing in the Netherlands
This subproject investigates the reproduction of Chinese characters in print in the Netherlands and its colonies during the nineteenth century. This study explores how scholarly, colonial, and religious and technological agendas created particular needs for the material reproduction of Chinese script and how their objectives shaped the roles Chinese characters assumed within the broader structures of nineteenth-century knowledge production.
At the outset, this study asks: in nineteenth-century books containing Chinese characters, would the significance and value of the books be undermined if those characters were removed? From this starting point, it develops a series of broader inquiries. What did the printing of Chinese characters mean for the development of Sinology and Japanese studies in the Netherlands? Beyond these disciplines, what significance did Chinese printing hold for the wider humanities and scientific scholarship of the nineteenth century? What role did printed Chinese characters play in diplomacy (such as in the context of the Opium War and Japan’s opening), in the governance of the Dutch East Indies, and in overseas missionary work? And what was the role of the techinical development in the abovementioned fields?
To address these questions, the study focuses on Johann Joseph Hoffmann, the first professor of Chinese and Japanese at Leiden University, and examines his interactions with contemporaries in academic, religious, political, and technical circles. It also considers the practices of Chinese-character printing in the Netherlands and its colonies since the nineteenth century, which were closely intertwined with Hoffmann’s contributions and with the networks in which he operated.
Collaborator: Yun Xie (Predoc)