Andy Hilkens

Andy Hilkens is a Newton International Fellow in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO) at Ghent University, Belgium. He holds a BA in Egyptology and Byzantine and Eastern Christian Studies from the KU Leuven, an MA in Ancien Eastern Literatures from the UCLouvain, and a PhD in History from Ghent University. Previously, he has held postdoctoral fellowships at Ghent University (2016-2019, 2019-2020) and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2018-2019). In 2020-2021 he was a scientific collaborator in the LOEWE-Cluster Minority Studies: Language and Identity at the Goethe-University in Frankfurt. Dr. Hilkens is co-host of the TeTra online Text and Transmission Joint Research seminar and co-founder and co-editor of the Brepols book series Eastern Christian Cultures in Contact. His main project, which is funded by the British Academy and the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO), investigates interfaith dialogue and polemics between Syriac Orthodox and Armenian Orthodox Christians in the eleventh and twelfth centuries through the lens of the Syriac-Armenian bilingual Syriac Orthodox bishop John bar Andreas. Syro-Armenian polemics in this period, which focus on orthodoxy as well as orthopraxy, are studied as part of a diachronic process as well as in the entangled context of Greek-Syriac, Greek-Armenian, Latin-Armenian and Latin-Greek relations.