The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) has chosen 14 new members. This honour has been bestowed upon Ineke Sluiter, Professor of Greek Language and Literature at Leiden University. Ineke Sluiter is currently a Fellow at NIAS, coordinating the NIAS Theme Group “Mass Communication in Classical Antiquity”. At NIAS, she is studying ancient ideas on rumour and gossip and their effects on the behaviour of groups.
Learned Society
Since its inception, the Academy has been a learned society of outstanding Dutch scientists and scholars. The Academy has approximately 500 members. Membership is awarded on the basis of scientific and scholarly achievement. Members are appointed for life. They are expected to contribute to the Academy’s work as the forum, conscience, and voice of the arts and sciences in the Netherlands. The new members will be installed on Monday 10 September in a ceremony at the Trippenhuis in Amsterdam.
Ineke Sluiter
Ineke Sluiter (Amsterdam 1959) studied Classics at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, where she also defended her PhD thesis (cum laude). After a post-doc fellowship from the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences and research fellowships at the Center for Hellenic Studies (Harvard; Washington DC, 1994/5) and the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, 1996/7), she was appointed Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia). In 1999 she was appointed Full Professor on the chair of Greek language and literature at Leiden University. Since 2000, she has been academic director of OIKOS, National Research School in Classical Studies, the Netherlands. She has been a NIAS Fellow since February 2012, where she examines the phenomena of rumour and gossip, and in particular, the ‘archaeology’ of concerns about the workings of fama (rumours) in classical antiquity.
Ineke Sluiter has won several prizes and awards both for her research and teaching, and has given several prestigious lectures. Some of her lectures are available as audio-books on cd. As a Spinoza Prize laureate she held a public Spinoza te Paard Lecture on the reading of thoughts, that can be viewed here.