dr. Lidewij van Gils

Lidewij van Gils is senior lecturer in Latin Language and Culture at the University of Amsterdam since 2020.

After her studies of Classics at the Vrije Universiteit Lidewij van Gils obtained her PhD at the same university in 2009 with a dissertation on the narrationes in Cicero’s forensic speeches. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2004 and she has combined her studies as a graduate student and as a PhD student with teaching (Latin and Greek in secondary education, Latin Literature and Linguistics at various Dutch universities and Italian at the Società Dante Alighieri). Together with other Ciceronian scholars she publishes regularly on Cicero´s life, rhetoric and speeches for a wide audience. Her academic research is mainly focused on communicative strategies in classical Latin prose authors, for which she makes use of pragmatics, politeness theories and cognitive linguistics. As an expert in linguistic approaches to classical languages, she is involved in the award winning research programme Anchoring Innovation. In 2017 she was elected Teacher of the Year at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam where she has been lecturer from 2010 to 2020.