Fields of interest

• Both ancient Greek and Byzantine culture in Renaissance Italy: cultural memory and identity theory, the concept of cultural transmission;
• Epigrammatic collections in Early Modern culture: the interface between literature and social practices;
• The verb in ancient Greek (especially pragmatic approaches to aspect use).

Research

Identity politics in the Byzantine diaspora literature of Quattro- and Cinquecento Italy.
Byzantine migrants in Italy during the 15th and 16th centuries have traditionally been represented as scholars fleeing from Constantinople with the Greek classics under their arms. Apart from being historically inaccurate, this image has resulted in a one-sided focus on the transmission of the ancient Greek literary and philosophical heritage. Yet the dynamics of cultural transmission obscures the complexities of Byzantine migration to Italy.
Employing recent memory and identity theories, this research seeks to chart the strategies which Byzantine migrants in Italy employed in order to forge new positions for themselves, to optimise their (group-)image and to attain their social and political aims (such as the reproduction of Greek culture and the liberation of Greece from Turkish domination). Special attention will be paid to the representation of the ancient and more recent Greek past. These processes will be considered in relation to the prejudices and expectations of the Italian intellectuals who admired the Byzantine newcomers as the heirs of the ancient Greek tradition but at the same time despised them for being unworthy of such an admirable heritage.
The research will concentrate on a wide range of texts written both in Latin and in Greek by Byzantine migrants in Italy and for a Western audience. Most important to the inquiry are paratexts (introductions of Byzantine scholars to editions of Greek classics and inaugural speeches at Italian universities), historiographical texts (mostly lamentationes over the fall of Greek cities), oratorical texts (orations or political pamphlets pleading the Greek case), and poetic texts (epigrammatic collections in which political messages are conveyed and images of Byzantine exile are constructed).
On the basis of analyses of these texts the strategic rhetorical manipulations of cultural memory and identity will be charted, complicating the traditional idea of unmediated cultural transmission from Byzantium to Italy. In this way, the research will also generally contribute to our insight into the role of literature in the formation of cultural memory and identity in a distinctive diaspora setting.

Curriculum Vitae

Han Lamers
Born: November 22, 1984

Education and assistantships

2003-2006
Bachelor of Arts in Classics at Leiden University (cum laude).

June 2006 
BA-thesis He said: ‘…’. Present/Aorist Aspect Choice in Speech Introductions inHomer (Iliad 1-12), Thucydides (Historiae) and Xenophon (Hellenica) (supervised by prof. dr I. Sluiter and dr A.M. Rademaker).

2006-2008
Master of Philosophy in Literature at Leiden University (cum laude).

June 2008 
MPhil-thesis A Byzantine Poet in Italian Exile: Politics and Identity Formation in the Latin Epigrams of Manilio Cabacio Rallo of Sparta (1447-1523)(supervised by prof. dr K.A.E. Enenkel and dr C.L. Pieper).

February – July 2007
Teacher of ancient Greek and Latin literature at the Minkema College in Woerden

April – September 2007
Assistant of dr T.M. Richardson at Leiden University (in his PhD-project Enacting Insight: Self-Cultivation in the Art of Pieter Bruegel the Elder)

September 2007 – January 2008
Student assistant of prof. dr M. Meadow at Leiden University (in his project on Samuel Quiccheberg’s museological treatise Inscriptiones vel tituli theatri amplissimi) 

February – July 2008
Student assistant in the international edition project Erasmi Opera Omnia at the Huygens Institute in The Hague

From September 2008
PhD-candidate at Leiden University.

Various masterclasses (with, e.g., Anthony Grafton, Lisa Jardine, Jürgen Pieters).

Awards and Scholarships

- Universitaire Scriptieprijs, 2008 (Leiden University Thesis Prize)
- NWO Toptalent-grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), funding a four-year PhD-project, 2008

Teaching Activities

September – December, 2008: Elementary Latin (BA-1 classics)

November 25, 2008: Leonardo Bruni’s Greek speech on the Florentine constitution (contribution to MA-seminar ‘Florentine literature and culture in the 15th century’).

Publications

H. Lamers & A.M. Rademaker, ‘Talking About Myself: A Pragmatic Approach to the Use of Aspect Forms in Lysias 12.4-19’, Classical Quarterly 57.2 (2007), 458-476

H. Lamers, ‘Marullo’s Catullus Imitations as a Form of Poetical Criticism’ (forthcoming in The Neo-Latin Epigram: Towards the Definition of a Genre, ed. by Karl Enenkel, Susanna de Beer, and David Rijser).