Convention 1: KU Leuven | Presenting & Discussing Research

28 & 29 January 2026 | Irish College, Leuven
Download the Book of Abstracts here.

The purpose of this convention is to:

  • Allow for the ESRs to gain experience in writing up and presenting their research (extended abstracts and talks) and discussing their data & methods, first findings and future plans (discussion sessions)
  • Allow for the ESRs to gain experience in providing constructive feedback to other researchers’ work (as a respondent)
  • Facilitate a reflection of experiences between the CASCADE ESRs and ESRs (plus supervisors) of the MCSA training network MECANO
  • Ask questions (about anything)
  • And enjoy!

DAY ONE:Wednesday 28th January
Conference Room 2 (CR2) 

09:15 – 09:30 Welcome address
09.30 –10:30“Bridging Distant and Close Reading: Evaluating Semantic Search for Intellectual History in 18th-Century Books” (Yu Wu, University of Helsinki) [respondent: Sofía Aguilar Valdez]
10.30 – 11.00Coffee Break
11:00 – 12:00“Bridging diachronic lexical semantics and conceptual history: the semantic evolution of progress in 18th century Britain” (Ángela María Gómez-Zuluaga, KU Leuven) [respondent: Rachel McCarthy]
12:00 – 13:00“From Fragment to Essay: Identifying Long-Form Reprinting in Eighteenth Century Print Culture” (Ke Shu, University of Helsinki) [respondent: Rasika Edirisinghe]
14:00 – 16:00Meetup-session MECANO–CASCADE
14:00 – 14:05 Welcome (Daria Kohler, MECANO Project Manager, KU Leuven)

14:05 – 14:15 Introducing CASCADE (James O’Sullivan, CASCADE Coordinator,
University College Cork)

14:15 – 14:25 introducing MECANO (Pieter d’Hoine, MECANO Coordinator, KU Leuven)

14:25 – 14:45 “The philosophical canon and the art of (mis)quoting Plato and Aristotle in the Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca” (Timo Zarakovitis, KU Leuven)

14:45 – 15:05 “The Presence of Classics in Early Modern Book History” (Jonas Fischer, U Helsinki)

15:05 – 15:25 “Contextual scientometrics: uncovering and understanding referencing patterns to the ancient canon in modern scholarly discourses” (Luisa Ripoll-Alberola, U Leipzig)

15:25 – 15:45 “Citations and quotations in the Naturalis Historia: creating the canon in the Encyclopaedia” (Valeria Irene Boano, KU Leuven)

15:45 – 16:10 Questions and discussion
16:10 – 16:30Coffee Break
16:30 – 17:30“Modeling Parallel Text: A Multidimensional Typology of Authorship and Transformation” (Rasika Edirisinghe, University College Cork)
[respondent: Yu Wu, University of Helsinki]
17:30 – 18:30“Modeling changing concepts with complex networks: A case study on scientific revolutions” (Sofía Aguilar Valdez, Saarland University)
[respondent: Ke Shu]

DAY TWO: Thursday 29th January
Conference Room 2 (CR2) 

9:00-10.00“SynFlow: Continuous Semantics Change Analysis via Dependency Co-occurrences” (Bách Phan-Tất, KU Leuven) [respondent: Maria Jimena Flores]
10.00 – 11.00“Linguistic Variation across Time and Text Types: Towards Unveiling Propagandistic Strategies during the Russo-Ukrainian War” (Anastasiia Vestel, Saarland University) [respondent: Penelope Nguyen]
11:00 – 11:30Coffee break
11:30-12:30“The Historical Thesaurus of Migration: an exploration of context-driven approaches and semantic change” (Maria Jimena Flores, University of Sheffield) [respondent: Ángela María Gómez-Zuluaga]
13:30 – 14:30“Measuring Change in Irish Literature” (Rachel McCarthy, University College Cork) [respondent: Anastasiia Vestel]
14:30 – 15:30“Contextualising the Semantic Hansard: A linguistically critical account” (Penelope Nguyen, University of Sheffield) [respondent: Bách Phan-Tất]
15:30 – 15:45Closing Session
15:45 – 16:15Coffee Break
16:15 – 18:30Walking Tour of Leuven [guide: Kris Heylen, KU Leuven]

Co–Funded by the European Union & the UKRI. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or [name of the granting authority]. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.