In 1987 Hans Smessaert obtained an MA in Germanic Philology at the KU Leuven, and in 1988 he took an MA in Linguistics at the University of Chicago, focussing on pragmatics (with Jerry Sadock) and semantics (with Jim McCawley).
In 1993 he defended his PhD in Linguistics, with a dissertation on the formal semantics of comparative determiners and aspectual adverbials in Dutch (supervised by Flip Droste and Alice ter Meulen).
From 1993 to 2003 he was a post-doctoral research fellow with the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO) working primarily on the formal semantics of determiners and aspectual adverbs, and on the syntax of Dutch adverbs and subordinating conjunctions.
In 2003 he became an Assistant Professor, in 2006 an Associate Professor and in 2014 a Professor of Dutch and General Linguistics at the KU Leuven. His undergraduate teaching consists of courses in Dutch linguistics (phonetics-phonology-morphology-syntax) and General linguistics (pragmatics and semantics) in the Speech and Hearing Therapy programme of the KU Leuven Faculty of Medicine. He also teaches formal semantics in the KU Leuven MA in Linguistics programme.
Since 2007 his research focusses on logical geometry, thus allowing him to (return to and) elaborate on the final chapter of his 1993 dissertation.
For more information see his personal website at the KU Leuven Linguistics Department.
