Rate My Professor Raf Van Rooy

Professor Raf Van Rooy, born in 1990, is an assistant professor (BOFZAP) of Latin literature in the Faculty of Arts at KU Leuven, affiliated with the Research Unit Literary Studies and Cultural Studies. He completed high school studies at the Kardinaal Van Rooy-Instituut in Lille and Vorselaar, followed by bachelor's and master's degrees in linguistics and literatures (Latin-Greek) at KU Leuven (2008-2012, summa cum laude), including an Erasmus exchange at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (2010-2011), and ancient Indo-European languages at UCLouvain (2012-2013, summa cum laude). He obtained a PhD in linguistics from KU Leuven in 2017 as a Research Foundation–Flanders (FWO) fellow and later BA and MA degrees in history from KU Leuven and Ghent University. His career includes FWO PhD and postdoctoral fellowships (junior 2017-2020, senior 2020-2022) at KU Leuven, combined from 2021 with a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship at the University of Oslo. Since 2022, he has held his current position and co-edited the journal Humanistica Lovaniensia and its Supplementa series (Peeters, from 2023). He received the KU Leuven Research Council Award in 2021 and has conducted research in Edmonton, Gotha, Leiden, Athens, and elsewhere.

Van Rooy's research specializes in Latin literature and linguistics, with emphasis on Neo-Latin and its interactions with New Ancient Greek and vernaculars. Core interests include the reception of Ancient Greek in early modern Latin literature (1400-1700), historiography of linguistics, the conceptual pair ‘language’ vs. ‘dialect’, Latin-Greek code-switching, the sixteenth-century Leuven Trilingual College, and evidentiality in classical languages. He has featured as expert in the documentary Alfavitos (2021) and the podcast De Universiteit van Vlaanderen (2021). Major publications are monographs Language or Dialect? The History of a Conceptual Pair (Oxford University Press, 2020) and New Ancient Greek in a Neo-Latin World: The Restoration of Classical Bilingualism in the Early Modern Low Countries and Beyond (Brill, 2023); edited works Trilingual Learning: The Study of Greek and Hebrew in a Latin World (1000-1700) (Brepols, 2022) and Greece's Labyrinth of Language (Language Science Press, 2020); and articles such as “Ippolita Maria Sforza, Student and Patroness of Greek in Milan (ca. 1465)” (Renaissance Quarterly, 2023) and “The Relevance of Evidentiality for Ancient Greek: Some Explorative Steps through Plato” (Journal of Greek Linguistics, 2016).