Tim Noens

Profile

PhD candidate
Ghent University
Email: Tim.Noens@UGent.be
Web:  http://research.flw.ugent.be/nl/tim.noens

Tim Noens (°1992) is a PhD student at the University of Ghent, Belgium. His research focuses on Latin literature written in the first century. He studies, amongst others, Statius’ Thebaid and Silvae, Pliny the Younger’s Letters, Martial’s Epigrams and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria. Being trained as a comparative scholar, he prefers to place classical texts into a dialogue with modern literature and art.

“I received a Bachelor and Master degree in Latin and Dutch Linguistics and Literature at the University of Ghent. Afterwards, I completed a master in Comparative Modern Literature at the same institution. Under the supervision of prof. dr. Wim Verbaal, I am currently working on a PhD research project (Flanders Research Foundation, 2015-2019). The project is titled ‘“I can’t go on. I’ll go on”. Silence as a multifunctional concept in Latin Domitianic Literature (ca.86-107)’. I am an editorial board member of the academic Journal of Latin Cosmopolitanism and European Literatures (JOLCEL) and the popular-science journal Hermeneus. Sporadically, I am also asked as a poetry and literary critic by The Dutch Review of Books and DeReactor.Platform of Literary Criticism.”

“What attracts me in the research group RELICS is that it aims to transgress conventionally established boundaries. By leaving behind the nationalistic and classicist paradigms in which we have been stuck for more than a century, we can open new perspectives upon and raise alternative questions about our European literary past. I have tried to incorporate RELICS’ philosophy into my own research by deliberately developing a comparative approach to classical texts. By reading, for instance, Pliny’s Letters through Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, or Martial’s Epigrams through James Joyce’s Ulysses, I hope to produce a new view upon and change the general perception of Latin literature written in the first century.”