Paul Michael Kurtz

Biography and/or project

I am an Associate Research Professor in the Department of History at Ghent University, where I lead an ERC Starting Grant on the history of philology. I am also a member of the Young Academy. Before coming to Ghent, I held research fellowships at Cambridge, Chicago, and Göttingen, where I completed my Dr. phil. in history.

A cultural, intellectual, and religious historian, with further expertise in ancient Judaism and Semitic studies, I concentrate my work on the formation and circulation of knowledge about the ancient world both in and between Europe, the Middle East, and India from 1770 to 1930. My research expands traditional work on the history of the humanities by combining an understanding of global and colonial history, media theory, informatics, and history of science.