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Veerle Fraeters specializes in Middle Dutch literary and cultural history, with a particular focus on mystical literature and the visionary genre, emphasizing female authorship. Her research sits at the intersection of philology, literary studies, cultural history, and religious studies, where she conducts investigations into the circulation and appropriation of medieval literature in modern contexts. She completed her studies in Ancient History (Lic. 1987) and Dutch Language and Literature (Lic. 1988) at KU Leuven and obtained her doctorate in 1996 from the University of Antwerp through an edition study of a unique Middle Dutch alchemical manuscript. After serving in various postdoctoral positions, she joined the Ruusbroec Institute at the University of Antwerp as a senior lecturer and was appointed a full professor in 2016. Between 2015 and 2019, she also served as the director of the institute and has supervised seven dissertations on text genres including mysticism, miracle books, and travel literature across disciplines such as literature, history, and philosophy. Her recent research project, “Mystical Heritage and Modern Identities” (BOF-UA 2019-2022), explored the appropriation of medieval mystic Hadewijch within the modern cultural field of Belgium, and in fall 2022 she was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University's Medieval Studies Institute, focusing on a project related to thirteenth-century female vernacular visionary mysticism.
Department of Psychology