Michiel Meeusen received his PhD in Literature from KU Leuven in 2013 with a dissertation on Plutarch’s Natural Questions. The 2016 monograph resulting from this research was awarded the Jan Gillis Prize from the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium (2018). I also co-edited the same text for the Collection des universités de France (2018), which received the Prix Raymond Weil from the Association pour l’encouragement des études grecques en France (2019), and the Prix Joseph Gantrelle from the Académie royale de Belgique (2021).
His primary research interests are situated at the junction of ancient science, medicine and technology, and the literature and culture of the High Roman Empire (1st–2nd c. CE), with a particular focus on the fascinating interaction between ancient ‘scientific’ and ‘literary’ cultures broadly defined. Dr. Meeusen has produced numerous research outputs in these fields (e.g., here and there, and here etc.) and has been affiliated with several institutions across the globe (in the UK, EU, and US).
Dr. Meeusen’s main attention while at CAS will go to his new book project which aims to explore the particularly rich and thought-provoking interaction between medical culture and learned society in the High Roman Empire. The book aims to develop an innovative approach to ancient medicine, based on how non-experts interacted in its history. By studying the human body as an object of elite knowledge and as a marker of societal normativity (along the fault lines of gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, religion), it hopes to make a meaningful contribution to the wider socio-cultural and intellectual resonance of ancient medicine in Graeco-Roman Antiquity and beyond.