Ingrid A. R. De Smet - Biography#

A Belgian national and native Flemish speaker, Ingrid De Smet read Classics and Medieval Studies at the KU Leuven (1983-1988), gaining scholarships for study and research sojourns in Perugia, Ravello and the Vatican, and Milan. She studied for a PhD in Modern languages at Cambridge University (1989-1993), thanks to a Benefactor’s Studentship from St John’s College. She held a Fellowship by Examination and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford (1994 - 1997), before being appointed as a lecturer in the French department at the University of Warwick (1997), where she progressed to the position of Professor in French and Neo-Latin Studies in the School of Modern Languages & Cultures (2014 -).

She was awarded a Warwick Higher Doctorate (2008), won a Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship (2011-2015) and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (2014).

De Smet has published widely on Neo-Latin literature; satire, pamphlets and polemics; the Republic of Letters; the history of scholarship, book history, and the Classical tradition; and hunting (falconry). She has twice directed Warwick’s interdisciplinary Centre for the Study of the Renaissance (2007 - 2010; 2014 - 2018), whilst her Italian connections made her well-suited to the academic directorship of Warwick in Venice (2015 - 2018).

A founding member and former secretary of the Cambridge Society of Neo-Latin Studies, Ingrid has acted as treasurer of the (British & Irish) Society for Neo-Latin Studies, assistant secretary of the Fédération Internationale des Instituts et Sociétés pour l’Étude de la Renaissance (FISIER) and Chair of publications for the Renaissance Society of America (RSA, 2015 - 2018), where she was the first European member to sit on the Board of Directors. Previously elected as an Advisory Board member (2006-2012), she became First Vice-President (2012 - 2015), then President (2015 - 2018), and is now Past President (2018-) of the International Association for Neo-Latin Studies (IANLS). She has thus been closely engaged in the IANLS’s international congresses at Budapest (2006), Uppsala (2009), Münster (2012), Vienna (2015), and Albacete (2018), while planning for Leuven (2021) and beyond.