Prof. Dr. Thomas Hoelbeek

Thomas Hoelbeek (°1981) obtained in 2007 a Master's degree (magna cum laude) in Linguistics and Literary Studies (French and Italian) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, defending a Master's thesis entitled "Le développement diachronique des emplois des locutions dérivées du mot 'travers'". In 2008 he obtained the certificate for Secondary Education (French and Italian) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (magna cum laude). Consequently he did a post-graduate in Italian Linguistics in Italy, at the Università di Pisa (summa cum laude). In 2010 he took the oath to become a sworn translator at the Court of First Instance of Brussels. In 2014 he obtained a double Ph.D. in Linguistics and Literary Studies, both at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the Université Libre de Bruxelles (summa cum laude). His thesis, entitled "The spatial expressions containing French 'travers' and Italian 'traverso'. A functional semantic description from a diachronic perspective", aims at describing in an exhaustive way the semantics and diachronic evolution of all uses of a set of expressions containing French 'travers' and Italian 'traverso'. From October 2015 to September 2016 he was Maître de Conférences in Translation Studies (Dutch-French) at the Université de Liège. In 2016 he obtained the Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults (CELTA, University of Cambridge). From October 2016 to April 2017 he was Maître de Langue at the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management (ULB). In 2017 he published a revised version of his Ph.D. dissertation at Brill in the monograph "The Evolution of Complex Spatial Expressions within the Romance Family. A Corpus-Based Study of French and Italian" (https://brill.com/abstract/title/32955). Currently he is an assistant professor in Translation Studies (French-Dutch) in the Department of applied Linguistics at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He is also president of the Linguistic Society of Belgium (BKL-CBL).

Selected publications

• Hoelbeek, T., 2022, The diffusion of French à travers from the 18th century onwards. Some steps toward an explanation, In: Corela. Cognition, représentation, langage. 20, 1, p. 1-25 25 p. 
• Fagard, B., de Mulder, W. & Hoelbeek, T., 2020, Sémantique des prépositions, Grande Grammaire Historique du Français. De Gruyter Mouton, 21 p. 
• Hoelbeek, T., 2017, The evolution of complex spatial expressions within the Romance family. A corpus-based study of French and Italian, Leiden/Boston: Brill. 247 p. (Brill's Studies in Historical Linguistics)