Research
Koen De Temmerman (born 1979) studied Classics (Ba 1999, Ma 2001) and Communication Studies (Ma 2002) at Ghent University and the University of Bologna. He received his PhD degree in Classics from Ghent University in 2006 and subsequently was a Francqui Fellow of the Belgian American Educational Foundation at Stanford University, visiting lecturer at University College Cork, Postdoctoral Fellow of the Flemish Research Foundation (F.W.O.-Vlaanderen) and Stanley Seeger Fellow at Princeton University. He has been a Research Professor at Ghent University since 2013. He is a member of the Young Academy of Belgium/Flanders (2013-2018), an associate member of Kyknos - The Swansea, Lampeter and Exeter Centre for Research on the Narrative Literatures of the Ancient World and a visiting member of the Classics Centre of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
De Temmerman works on Greek and Latin novels and biographies from the first few centuries of the Common Era and their persistence in later periods. His main thematic focus is character(s) and characterization. Methodologically, his work combines insights from both ancient rhetoric (and physiognomy) and modern literary theory (mainly narratology). He examines (1) modern and ancient theoretical models that conceptualize literary character and characterization, and (2) ancient and late antique authors' creative adoption of rhetorical and physiognomical techniques in literary construction of êthos (ethopoeia, chria, paradigm, etc.).
His first monograph (Crafting Characters. Heroes and Heroines in the Ancient Greek Novel) was published by Oxford University Press in 2014 and examines narratological and rhetorical constructions of characters in the ancient Greek novel. Besides other projects, he is currently editing an Oxford Handbook of Ancient Biography (under contract with Oxford University Press).
For his PhD dissertation (2006; supervisor: Prof. Kristoffel Demoen) De Temmerman was awarded the Triennial Prize for Humanities by the Flemish Scholarly Foundation (2008). Between 2014 and 2019, he was the Principal Investigator of an ERC Starting Grant project called Novel Saints. Ancient Novelistic Heroism in the Hagiography of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Since 2019, he leads an ERC Consolidator Grant project entitled Novel Echoes. Ancient Novelistic Receptions and Concepts of Fiction in Late Antique and Medieval Secular Narrative from East to West.
Research interests include speech and (ancient) rhetoric, ancient fiction, biography, hagiography, physiognomy, gender and sexuality in the ancient world, narratology, literary theory, character, typification and identity construction.
