About
I am a research fellow at Leiden University and Ghent University. My current research deals with the study of personal names and settlement names in Dutch and Belgian Brabant as a window on Brabantine medieval history. My expertise lies in on the crossroads between Germanic philology, Romance philology and medieval settlement history.
Notable discoveries in my career have been
- (2018) a Romance etymology for Dutch polder
- (2018) a Celtic etymology for Dutch straf
- (2014) reading the word auzandils on the Gothic Bologna fragment
From 2014-2016 and from 2018-20, I was a lecturer at Leiden University , teaching academic courses on Historical Linguistics, Old High German, Old Dutch, Old Saxon, Gothic, Paleolinguistics and Morphology.
I have worked from 2016-2018 at the EVALISA project at Ghent University where I focussed on the Proto-Indo-European origin of Old Germanic and Old Romance verbs that show non-canonical subject marking.
In 2018, I received a PhD from Leiden University for my research on language contact between Merovingian Gallo-Romance and Merovingian Frankish. I have a keen interest in medieval vernacular languages and the historical experiences of the medieval commoner.
By training, I am a linguist and a medievalist. In recent years, I have expanded my skills to include settlement history and agricultural history. I hope to improve my digital cartography skills in the future.
I have written numerous popularizing articles about Dutch etymology, the history of the Dutch language and its links to the history of French. In the past years, I have also set up a national conference for Old Germanic Studies (Junius Symposium) together with my colleague Thijs Porck and I have given multiple newspaper and radio interviews on the prehistory of Dutch. I am also involved with several heritage projects highlighting the dimension of language when disclosing historical narratives.
