Stijn Bussels is Academic Director of the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society and Professor of Art history, especially before 1800.

More information about Stijn Bussels

Fields of interest

• early modern art and architectural history
• early modern theatre history
• agency and performativity
• the appropriation of ancient concepts, as the sublime and magnificence

Research

Stijn Bussels teaches art and architectural history. He started teaching at the University of Ghent. In 2008 he became Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen. In Leiden his teaching concentrates on the early modern Low Countries.

CV

Stijn Bussels studied art history at the University of Ghent. As nominee of the FWO Flanders, he attained his PhD in 2005. His thesis was reworked and published as 'The Antwerp Entry of Prince Philip in 1549. Rhetoric, Performance and Power' (Rodopi, 2012).
In 2005 he started working as postdoctoral researcher at the VICI-project of Caroline van Eck, 'Art, Agency and Living Presence'. As postdoc, he focused on ancient Roman writers dealing with the belief that an image lives. This research resulted in The Animated Image. Roman Theory on Naturalism, Vividness and Divine Power (Akademie Verlag/LUP, 2012).
After this project Stijn Bussels became Assistant Professor Art and Theatre History at the University of Groningen. He continued working with Caroline van Eck. This resulted in, amongst others, the special issue Theatricality in Early Modern Art and Architecture of Art History (April 2010). Next to that, he co-edited a book volume on the sublime before Nicolas Boileau (Intersections, Brill, 2012).
Between 2013 and 2018 he was the Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project 'Elevated Minds. The sublime in the public arts in seventeenth-century Paris and Amsterdam'. This research resulted in a special issue of JHNA and publications in the peer reviewed journals, as Comparative Drama and History of European Ideas.
In 2018 he became Professor Art History, especially before 1800 at the Leiden Centre for the Arts in Society and a year later the head of the Leiden Department of Art History.

Grants and awards

Between 2013 and 2018, Stijn Bussels was Principal Investigator of the ERC starting grant project 'Elevated Minds. The Sublime in the Public Arts in Seventeenth-Century Paris and Amsterdam' (1.250.000 euro). 

Activities