Mark Janse - Biography#

Mark Janse is Emeritus Research Professor of Ancient and Asia Minor Greek at Ghent University and Affiliated Researcher at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. He studied Classics (1981), Hebrew (1983) and Historical Linguistics (1985) at Ghent University, where he also earned his PhD in Greek & Latin Linguistics (1995). He was Editor of Bibliographie Linguistique (UNESCO) from 1982 until 2004, during which period he took up visiting professorships at Ghent University (1996 - 2004) and the University of Amsterdam (2003-2004). He is a former Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford (2007 & 2014), a former AI (Άλφα-Ένα) Fellow of the Onassis Foundation in Greece (2008 & 2015) and a former Fellow (2013), then Associate (2014 - 2020) of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies. He was the Onassis (USA) Senior Visiting Scholar at Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and the University of Arizona in 1912; the first Institute Professor of the Summer Institute at the Princeton Athens Center for Research & Hellenic Studies in 2018; the Kenneth E. Naylor Memorial Lecturer at The Ohio State University in 2021; the Gaisford Lecturer at the University of Oxford in 2022; the Jeremie Septuagint Lecturer at the University of Cambridge in 2024.

His research covers the entire history of the Greek language from Homer up to the Modern Greek dialects, with special interests in Homeric and Byzantine metre and versification, Septuagint and New Testament Greek, female speech, profane and obscene language, language variation and change, language contact and language death, and the Medieval and Modern Greek varieties of Asia Minor Greek, on which topics he has published and lectured extensively. He is the leading authority in the study of Cappadocian Greek, a grammar of which is forthcoming later this year. ‘Last Words’ (seriousFilm, 2014), a documentary film by Koert Davidse about the impact of his research on the Cappadocian community in Greece, was selected at various international documentary and short film festivals.