Rate My Professor Lara Sels

Lara Sels is a guest professor in the Greek Studies Department of KU Leuven's Faculty of Arts. She contributes to the teaching of Byzantine history and Byzantine art and supports the editorial work on the editions of the Series Graeca of the Corpus Christianorum. She graduated as a Slavist in 1996 and as a Classicist in 1998 from Ghent University, where she also obtained her PhD in East European Languages and Cultures in 2004. As a postdoctoral researcher, she lectured in Old Church Slavonic language and literature at the Ghent University Slavistics Department until 2012. That year, she joined the Greek Studies Department at KU Leuven as a postdoctoral collaborator, later becoming a visiting lecturer and guest professor.

Her research focuses on palaeoslavistics, old Church Slavonic language and literature, Byzantine-Slav cultural relations, translation literature, manuscript study, textual criticism, and text editing, particularly translations of Byzantine-Greek source texts into Old Church Slavonic. She serves as co-promotor on the FWO-funded projects 'The Slavonic Metaphrasis of Byzantine Orthodoxy. A Case Study on the Anthological Habit in South Slavonic Translation Literature: the (Ps.-)Anastasian Question-and-answers and the Soterios' (2024-2028) and 'The Slavonic Metaphrasis of Byzantine Orthodoxy. A Digital Inventory of South Slavonic Translation Literature applied to Research on Translated Authority and Linked Texts' (2024-2027). Notable publications include 'Towards a Greek-Slavonic Edition of the Life of St Blasios of Amorion (BHG 278)' with G. Gollo (Byzantinoslavica, 2026), 'Byzantine Hagiography in Slavonic Translation: Contexts and Digital Tools' with R. Ceulemans (Byzantinoslavica, 2025), 'The Slavonic Tradition of Ignatius' Epistola ad Romanos (CPG 1025.4)' (MUSEON, 2023), and 'Manuscripts and Margins. The Case of the Late Mediaeval Slavonic Hexaemeron Collection or Šestodnevnik and its Greek Source Text' in Caught in Translation (Brill, 2020). She has also published in memoriam pieces on Francis J. Thomson and contributed to digital tools for Slavonic studies.