Louis Verreth is a PhD candidate at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society.

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Research and teaching profile

Louis Verreth (°1998, Antwerp) is a PhD candidate at Leiden University, specializing in the reception of classical Latin literature in Italian Renaissance humanism. After studying Classics and Italian Studies at KU Leuven and Università di Bologna, he embarked on his PhD project at Leiden University in 2020. At Leiden, he prepares a dissertation on Latin panegyrical poetry for Lorenzo de’ Medici “il Magnifico” under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Antje Wessels, dr. Susanna de Beer and dr. Christoph Pieper. For his project, he regularly stays at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR), which generously supports his work on manuscripts in the city’s heritage libraries. During his PhD trajectory, he has also been visiting researcher at Paris Sorbonne’s research group ‘Rome et ses Renaissances,’ at the Dutch University Institute in Florence (NIKI), as well as Università di Bologna’s department of Classical and Italian Philology (FICLIT). These research stays have been realized with scholarships from the Dutch Cultuurfonds, the NIKI, and the Erasmus+ program.

His research on Italian Renaissance humanism has resulted in various publications. He has authored two articles in international peer-reviewed journals on the major Florentine humanist Angelo Poliziano: “Poliziano Correcting Poliziano: A Preliminary Survey of Handwritten Corrections in the Editio Princeps of the Miscellaneorum Centuria Prima”, Quaerendo 54.1 (2024) 77–102 (available in open access), and “Angelo Poliziano on Achilles and Patroclus. A Note on the Genesis of Poliziano’s Miscellaneorum Centuria Prima XXXXV,” Schede umanistiche 35.1 (2021) 169-180. Together with Jeroen De Keyser, he has produced the critical edition of Francesco Filelfo’s translation of the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum; this book has appeared in 2022 in Edizioni dell’Orso’s prestigious Hellenica series. He is currently preparing an edited volume together with Susanna de Beer and Ruben Poelstra entitled The Return of the Golden Age. The Reception of Golden Age Rhetoric from Antiquity up to the 21st Century, to be published in Brill’s series Euhormos: Greco-Roman Studies in Anchoring Innovation. He is also preparing an epilogue for a forthcoming edition of a New Ancient Greek laudatory poem of Antwerp (1565), a project which he conducts in close collaboration with KU Leuven’s Seminarium Philologiae Humanisticae. For the broader public, he also regularly writes articles and blogs on the reception of antiquity, including a blog on the reception of Greek mythology in songtexts by Italian pop artist Mahmood.

L. Verreth takes part in several scientific collaborations: he conducts his PhD project in the context of the NWO Anchoring Innovation research agenda, for which he co-organized the academic workshop “The Return of the Golden Age” (23-25 June, 2022) in Rome at the KNIR. He further acts as a board member of the international research network RELICS, which is dedicated to the dynamic role of Latin as a European literary and cultural language, and serves as editor for the Ghent-based peer-reviewed and Open Access journal of Latin studies JOLCEL. Finally, in his capacity as one of Leiden University’s KNIR ambassadors, he promotes the courses and scholarships of the KNIR within the Dutch academic community.

At Leiden, he has (co-)taught courses in Latin language acquisition (BA1) and Renaissance Latin (BA2).

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