I am a PhD candidate in theoretical and Semitic linguistics. I study how language uses spatiality to express concepts like agency, causation, and evidentiality. I take a theoretical linguistic perspective and apply the results to Biblical Hebrew.
I do this at Leiden University and Radboud University under the supervision of Johan Rooryck and Ellen van Wolde.
Publications
Refereed articles
| In preparation | Camil Staps and Johan Rooryck, in preparation. ‘On the demonstrative nature of finite complementizers’. Draft on LingBuzz. |
| 2022 | Camil Staps, 2022. ‘Voice, discourse prominence, and aspect. The niphal and passive qal of yālad’, in Pierre Van Hecke and Hanneke van Loon (eds.), Where is the way to the dwelling of light? Studies in Genesis, Job and linguistics in honor of Ellen van Wolde, pp. 387–408. Leiden: Brill. doi: 10.1163/9789004536296_020 |
Camil Staps, 2022. ‘Lip̄nē ‘in the face of’: a Locative preposition with a threatening connotation’. Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 22 (1), pp. 1–24. doi: 10.5508/jhs29582 | |
| 2020 | Camil Staps, 2020. ‘“When Dust Was Poured Out”: Creation in Job 38.36–38’. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 44 (3), pp. 456–471. doi: 10.1177/0309089219862828 |
Camil Staps, 2020. ‘Prepositions and the Grammaticalization of Ancient Hebrew Bipartite Reciprocal Markers’. Journal of Semitic Studies 65 (1), pp. 61–84. doi: 10.1093/jss/fgz050 | |
| 2019 | Camil Staps, John van Groningen and Rinus Plasmeijer, 2019. ‘Lazy Interworking of Compiled and Interpreted Code for Sandboxing and Distributed Systems’, in Jurriën Stutterheim and Wei Ngan Chin (eds.), Implementation and Application of Functional Languages (IFL '19), September 25–27, 2019, Singapore, Singapore. doi: 10.1145/3412932.3412941 |
| 2018 | Camil Staps, 2018. ‘A Case Study of Reciprocal Middles in Biblical Hebrew: the Niphal of לחם’. Orientalia 87 (2), pp. 159–183. |
Book reviews
| 2021 | Camil Staps, 2021. ‘Review of: Peter Bekins, Inscriptions from the World of the Bible. A Reader and Introduction to Old Northwest Semitic’. Bibliotheca Orientalis 78 (5/6), pp. 723–726. |
Camil Staps, 2021. ‘Review of: Margaret Winters, Historical Linguistics’. LINGUIST List 32 (1438). | |
| 2020 | Camil Staps, 2020. ‘Review of: Elitzur A. Bar-Asher Siegal, The NP-strategy for Expressing Reciprocity’. Bibliotheca Orientalis 77 (3/4), pp. 318–322. |
Non-refereed work
| 2019 | Camil Staps, 2019. ‘Tense, Aspect and Modality in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic’. Master thesis, Leiden University. |
Camil Staps, 2019. ‘Lazy Interworking of Compiled and Interpreted Code for Sandboxing and Distributed Systems’. Master thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen. | |
| 2017 | Camil Staps, 2017. ‘Code generation for the Thumb-2 instruction set’. Bachelor thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen. |
Talks
I keep track of the conferences I visit and how much CO2 I emit in doing so.
| 2022 | Dec 9, CogLing Days | With John Rooryck. Finite complementizers as demonstratives in the clausal domain (slides; handout). |
| Nov 21, SBL Annual | With Martijn Beukenhorst. Semantic properties of prepositions: the distinction between causal מן and ב (slides). | |
| Nov 9, COCOA | With Johan Rooryck. Space in the causal chain: The perspective from French and Biblical Hebrew (handout). | |
| Aug 25, SLE2022 | With Johan Rooryck. On the demonstratives nature of finite complementizers (slides; handout). | |
| Jan 12, AIL2 | With Johan Rooryck. French double Agents: a force-theoretic account of de and par (handout). | |
| 2020 | Jan 10, NL-FP day | With John van Groningen and Rinus Plasmeijer. Lazy interworking of compiled and interpreted code. |
| 2019 | Sep 27, IFL31 | By Rinus Plasmeijer, with John van Groningen. Lazy interworking of compiled and interpreted code for sandboxing and distributed systems. |
| 2018 | Jan 26, CLIN28 | Combining grammatical features for dating texts in small-corpus languages (abstract & slides). |
| Jan 5, NL-FP day | Cloogle: a programming language search engine and its applications (abstract & slides). |
Software projects
| Məḇaqqēš | A spreadsheet application for scholars of the Hebrew Bible and Biblical Hebrew. |
| HebrewTools | Several web applications for Biblical Hebrew education (GitHub). |
| Nitrile | A package manager for the functional programming language Clean. |
| Cloogle | A search engine for Clean code (GitLab). |
Find more on GitLab, GitHub, and git.camilstaps.nl.
Biblical Hebrew reading group
I'm running a weekly online reading group in Biblical Hebrew, open to new members.
Grants
| 2019–2024 | NWO Promoties in de Geesteswetenschappen, €249K (covering my PhD project; applied for by Holger Gzella; grant no. PGW.19.015). |
Teaching
| 2022–2023 | Hebrew I–II, Radboud University Nijmegen (10 ECTS). |
| 2021–2022 | Hebrew I–II, Radboud University Nijmegen (10 ECTS). |
| 2020–2021 | Hebrew II, Radboud University Nijmegen (5 ECTS). |
| Hebrew I–III, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (15 ECTS). | |
| 2015–2019 | Student assistant for various courses in computing science, Radboud University Nijmegen. See under Employment for a list of courses. |
Employment
| Sep. 2019–present | PhD candidate, Leiden University & Radboud University Nijmegen. Supervised by Johan Rooryck and Ellen van Wolde. |
| Feb. 2023–Jun. 2023 | Lecturer, Radboud University Nijmegen. |
| Sep. 2019–Aug. 2021 | Scientific programmer / software architect, TOP Software. |
| Feb. 2021–Jul. 2021 | Lecturer, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. |
| Sep. 2015–Aug. 2019 | Student assistant, Radboud University Nijmegen (click for an overview of activities).2018–19: work on the Clean ecosystem 2017–18: Combinatorics, Functional Programming for AI 2016–17: Algorithms and Data Structures, Combinatorics, Functional Programming for AI, Functional Programming 1, Introduction to Cryptography, Operating Systems 2015–16: Combinatorics, Functional Programming 1, Functional Programming 2, Introduction to Cryptography, Mathematical Structures |
| May 2013–Mar. 2019 | Owner of ViviSoft. |
Education
| 2017–2019 | Research MA. Hebrew and Aramaic Studies, Leiden University (cum laude). |
| 2017–2019 | MSc. Software Science, Radboud University Nijmegen (summa cum laude). |
| 2014–2017 | BSc. Computing Science, Radboud University Nijmegen (cum laude). |