Dr J Bloemendal (b. 1961) has been appointed professor by special appointment (bijzonder hoogleraar) of Neo-Latin at the Faculty of Humanities of the Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA). The chair was endowed by the Huygens Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).

Jan Bloemendal performs research on Neo-Latin literature, in particular in the Low Countries. He obtained his PhD with an edition of Daniel Heinsius’s ‘Orange tragedy’ Auriacus, sive Libertas saucia after which he published in the fields of the classics and early modern theatre, emblem studies, didactic poetry, lyrical poetry, literary criticism and reception of the classics, as well as on Erasmus’s theological and didactical works. He furthermore edited a volume on Utrecht Neo-Latin poets. During the past few years his research interests largely lay with poetics and the impact of early modern theatre.

As professor by special appointment, Bloemendal will dedicate himself to consolidating the ties between the Huygens Institute and the department of Latin Literature and Linguistics at the UvA. Furthermore, he will focus on the relation between Neo-Latin language and literature in the vernacular and the position of Neo-Latin language and literature with respect to that of the middle ages and classical antiquity.

Bloemendal has been working at the Huygens Institute since 2000 where he was initially responsible for completing an edition of Vossius’s Poeticae institutiones. Since 2004, he is working on the project ‘Latin and Vernacular Cultures. Theatre and public opinion in the Netherlands ca 1510-1625’ both at the Huygens Institute and at the department of Latin Literature and Linguistics of the UvA for which he acquired a Vidi subsidy from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) in 2003. Bloemendal also runs a publishing company, Florivallis, which is active in the field of humanism and Neo-Latin texts.