Keynote
Sebastian Brock
Varietas syriaca in long Late Antiquity
Bio: Sebastian Paul Brock is an Emeritus Reader in Syriac Studies and Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, a Fellow of the British Academy. Specialist in Syriac literature, culture and church history, biblical studies, and Jewish studies, he is the author of over fifty books, and of more than 500 scholarly articles.
Introduction to Languages and Documents of Oriental Christianities
Federico Alpi
Classical Armenian
Bio: Federico Alpi is a research fellow at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. He graduated in Armenology at the University of Bologna and obtained his PhD in Oriental Studies from the University of Pisa in 2015. Since October 2018 he has been coordinating, for the Fondazione per le scienze religiose, the edition of the Armenian section of the Corpus Christianorum – Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Generaliumque Decreta.
Oleksii Chekal
Calligraphy: Classical Syriac (Eastern), Old Georgian, and Middle (Christian) Arabic
(exercise sessions)
Bio: Oleksii Chekal is a Ukrainian graphic designer, calligrapher, and art historian. He is a visiting professor at the Florence Classical Arts Academy. He specialises in complex cross-cultural and cross-language design tasks for scholarly and religious projects (Christianity, Judaism, Islam). He has extensive experience working with historical script styles and achieving harmony between typography and calligraphy using Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac scripts for institutional clients of many faiths.
Joseph Faragalla
Middle (Christian) Arabic
Bio: Joseph Faragalla (PhD 2018, Philipps University of Marburg) is a principal investigator of the DFG-funded project “Simʿān ibn Kalīl’s Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew. Critical Edition, Translation and Research on the Religious-Historical Significance of the Work” based at the Institute of Near and Middle Eastern Studies, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. His main fields of interest are Christian Arabic Literature, theology, biblical exegesis in Arabic and Christian Arabic manuscripts.
Alexey Muraviev
Classical Syriac (Eastern), Old Georgian
Bio: Alexey Muraviev is a Professor of Late Antique and Medieval History at HSE University (Moscow) and a DFG Fellow at the University of Tübingen. He specialises in the history and philology of the early Medieval Christian Orient, patristics, hagiography, and history of science and philosophy and teaches Late Antique history, history of Near Eastern Religions, Syriac, Greek, Georgian and Arabic languages. His main areas of interest cover Syriac, Christian Arabic, Georgian, Armenian and Ethiopic. He studied under Michel van Esbroeck and Sergei Averintsev. He received fellowships the CNRS (Paris), Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, University of Munich and IAS, Princeton. He authored several books, mainly on Syriac and other Oriental Christian matters.
Antje Wendtland
Sogdian
Bio: Antje Wendtland studied Indo-European Studies, Old Iranian and Old Indian languages in Göttingen, (Sogdian and Sanskrit also in London). Her PhD is on the development of the definite article in Sogdian. She mainly works on the Sogdian language, some Bactrian, Pamir languages, and on Iranian religions and Manichaeism.
Interconnected Cultures of the Near East
Vittorio Berti
Syriac translations from Greek: building cultural (and spiritual) bridges and erecting theological walls
Bio: Vittorio Berti is Associate Professor of History of Christianity at the University of Padua, with special interests in the Syriac churches during late antiquity and the early Islamic age. He studied the life and development of the intellectual elites of East-Syrian schools and monasteries, and their philosophical, theological and spiritual culture. Former secretary of the Italian Society of Syriac Studies (Syriaca), he is member of several international research projects. Author of more then thirty scientific contributions, he wrote two monographs: Vita e Studi di Timoteo I, patriarca cristiano di Baghdad, Peeters, Paris 2009 and L’au-delà de l’âme et l’en-deçà du corps. Approches d’anthropologie chrétienne de la mort dans l’église syro-orientale, Paradosis, Fribourg 2015.
Richard Payne
Iranian Christians
Bio: Richard Payne is an Associate Professor of History, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. A historian of the Iranian world in late antiquity, ca. 200–800 CE, Payne’s research focuses primarily on the dynamics of Iranian imperialism, specifically how the Iranian (or Sasanian) Empire successfully integrated socially, culturally, and geographically disparate populations from Arabia to Afghanistan into enduring political networks and institutions. His recent book, A State of Mixture: Christians, Zoroastrians, and Iranian Political Culture in Late Antiquity, explores the problem of religious diversity within the empire, showing how Syriac-writing Christians could create a place for themselves in a political culture not of their own making. He is currently at work on the role of Zoroastrian religious institutions and the intersection of ideological and material dimensions in Iranian history.
Philip Wood
Christians in the Abbasid caliphate
Bio: Philip Wood is Tejpar Professor of Inter-Religious Studies at Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations. He is a historian and works on Christians in the Middle East, c.500-900 CE. He has published monographs with OUP and Princeton University Press and currently runs a research group looking at the formation and maintenance of religious groups in the Abbasid caliphate (750-1000)
Caucasus in the Eurasian Cultural and Commercial Continuum
Ian Colvin
Placing Late Antique Lazika in a Eurasian Cultural and Commercial Continuum—Black Sea, Caucasian, or Eurasian?
Bio: Ian Colvin is a historian and Byzantinist specialising in the South Caucasus and the Late Roman classicising historians. He works for the University of Cambridge’s School Classics Project, directs the Anglo-Georgian Archaeological Expedition to Nokalakevi, and lectures for Martin Randall Tours, Andante Travels, and Steppes Travel.
Tamara Pataridze
How the Rise of the Cristian Literature in Arabic (8th-10th centuries) Reconnected the Syriac and Georgian Literatures again
Bio: Tamara Pataridze gained her PhD in Oriental Studies (Oriental Languages and Literatures) from the University of Louvain (Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium) in 2012. Her research interest lies in the study of the circulation of the texts and ideas between the Greek, Syriac, Christian Arabic, and Georgian manuscripts from the Holy Land region. Conducting her research in different countries and research institutions, she was an F.N.R.S researcher at the Centre for Oriental Studies of UCLouvain (Louvain-La-Neuve), a researcher at the Institute for the Advanced Study of the Central European University (Budapest), the Center for the Study of Christianity of Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Jerusalem), and the University of Oxford and Bodleian Libraries (Oxford). She has authored several publications on the issues of cultural and literary connections between the different Christian communities of the Middle East, on the oriental manuscript collections, and Palestino-Sinaitic monastic centres.
Giusto Traina
Armenian connections (IV-VI CE)
Bio: Giusto Traina is a Professor of Roman history at Sorbonne University. He is a specialist in military history and geopolitics of the ancient world, in particular political and military relations between the Mediterranean, the Caucasus and Iran. Among his most recent publications: 428, une année ordinaire à la fin de l’Empire romain, new revised and corrected edition (Fayard, 2020); La storia speciale: Perché non possiamo fare a meno degli antichi romani (Laterza, 2020) and the French edition Histoire incorrecte de Rome (Les Belles Lettres, 2021). He also directed De la préhistoire au Moyen-Âge, first volume of the series Mondes en guerre (Passés composés, 2019), and co-directed Les mondes remains. Questions d’archéologie et d’histoire (Ellipses, 2020) and Le récit de guerre comme source d’histoire, de l’Antiquité à nos jours (Presses universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2022). In 2023 will be released La guerre mondiale des Romains. De la mort de César à la mort d’Antoine et Cléopâtre (44-30 av. J.-C.) (Fayard).
Material History of the Eurasian Connections: Archaeology and Architecture
Johnathan Hardy
Reconstructing the Past: 3D Modelling and Spatial Analysis of Sasanian and Christian Art and Architecture
Bio: Johnathan W. Hardy (PhD Candidate, University of Minnesota) is currently a fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art developing a metrological and iconographical analysis of Sasanian seals and sealings. His research blends traditional art historical and archaeological approaches with data science and geospatial analysis to explore the complex lives of Christians and Sasanians in late antiquity.
Emma Loosley
Neither East nor West? The Architecture and Archaeology of the Churches in the East
Bio: Emma Loosley Leeming is Professor of Middle Eastern and Caucasian Christianities at the University of Exeter. Her primary research is on the material culture of Late Antique Christianity with particular reference to Syria and Georgia. She has conducted fieldwork across the Middle East and Caucasus, most notably in Syria, Georgia, Iran and the UAE, and is currently working on a monograph concerning the vernacular churches of Eastern Georgia.
Pavel Lurje
Wine as gift in Christian communities of Semirechie
Bio: Pavel Lurje is the Head of the Sector of Central Asia, Caucasus and Crimea, Senior Research Fellow of the Oriental Department of the State Hermitage Museum, and the Head of the Panjikent Expedition. His dissertation, entitled “Historico-linguistical analysis of Sogdian Toponymy”, supervised by Dr. Vladimir A. Livshits, was defended in June 2004. His research interests include: Iranian linguistics, Middle Iranian languages, onomastics, Central Asian antiquities, historical geography and toponymy, language, history, archaeology, culture, arts of Sogdiana and neighbouring lands.
Intellectual Cultures Along the Silk Roads
Yuliya Minets
Languages and Linguistic Awareness in Syriac Late Antiquity
Bio: Yuliya Minets is an Associate Professor at the Department of Modern Languages and Classics, University of Alabama. Her primary research interest concerns intellectual, cultural, religious, and social processes in Late Antiquity, with a major focus on the formation of and interactions between Syriac, Byzantine, Latin, and Coptic traditions of Christianity as well as their relationship with Greco-Roman polytheism and Hellenistic and Rabbinic Judaism. Her recent monograph, The Slow Fall of Babel: Languages and Identities in Late Antique Christianity (Cambridge, 2022), explores early Christian ideas about foreign languages, linguistic history, and linguistic diversity attested in literary traditions in Late Antiquity.
Andrea Piras
Textual Imageries of Manichaeism and Christianity in Turfan area
Bio: Andrea Piras is a Full Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of Bologna (Department of Cultural Heritage). His field of research deals with Zoroastrian (Avestan and Pahlavi) and Iranian Manichaen texts, and also with intercultural phaenomena related to Christianity, Buddhism and Islam in Central Asia. Professor of Iranian Philology at the University of Venice Ca’Foscari, at the University of Lausanne (Université d’été en Langues de l’Orient) and a Member of the Institute of Advanced Study (Princeton). Among his works: Hādōxt Nask 2. Il racconto zoroastriano della sorte dell’anima (2000); Verba Lucis. Scrittura, immagine e libro nel manicheismo (2012); Manicheismo (2015).
Emilie Villey
Quelques observations à propos de l’influence culturelle chinoise et indienne sur les savants de langue syriaque des 6e-8e s
Bio: Émilie Villey is a researcher at the CNRS (Orient & Méditerranée, UMR 8167) specializing in the history of astronomy, to which she contributes by studying Syriac sources. After a PhD defended at the University of Caen (2012), she completed a two-year post-doc at the Excellence Cluster TOPOI in Berlin. She is currently continuing her research in Munich as Guest Scholar of the Ptolemaeus Arabus and Latinus project (2022-2023).
The Written Word. Manuscripts & Inscriptions from the Caucasus to Central Asia
Simon Brelaud
An epigraphic perspective on Syriac communities: from the Middle to the Far East
Bio: Simon Brelaud is an assistant visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches the history of Christianity in the Middle East. He is interested in the social history of Christians in Roman, Sassanian, and early Islamic Mesopotamia, using both archaeological evidence and literary sources.
Oleksii Chekal
The Aesthetics of Letterforms of the Christian Near East: Bridging the Worlds and Scripts with Calligraphy and Typography
Bio: Oleksii Chekal is a Ukrainian graphic designer, calligrapher, art historian. He is a visiting professor at the Florence Classical Arts Academy. He specialises in complex cross-cultural and cross-language design tasks for scholarly and religious projects (Christianity, Judaism, Islam). He has extensive experience of working with historical script styles and achieving harmony between typography and calligraphy using Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac scripts for institutional clients of many faiths.
Bernard Outtier
Usages inconnus de l’encre rouge dans des manuscrits géorgiens des X-XI-èmes siècles
Bio: Bernard Outtier is a Senior Researcher Emeritus at the CNRS, an Emeritus Professor of Armenian Literature at the University of Geneva, and a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia and of the Academy of Sciences of Georgia. Specialist in the languages and literature of the Near East and the Caucasus, in particular Armenology, he is the author of nearly two hundred publications (books and articles) on Near Eastern and Caucasian literature, music and linguistics.
Christian Communities through the Changing Worlds (Rome, Persia, Central Asia)
Simon Brelaud
Le christianisme parmi les Arabes au tournant de l’islam
Bio: Simon Brelaud is an assistant visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches the history of Christianity in the Middle East. He is interested in the social history of Christians in Roman, Sassanian, and early Islamic Mesopotamia, using both archaeological evidence and literary sources.
Alexey Lyavdansky
Protecting Mother and her Child: Incantations against the Child-stealing Demon in the Syriac Tradition of Charms
Bio: Alexey Lyavdansky is a lecturer of Classical Hebrew and Aramaic at the Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies, National Research University Higher School of Economics (Moscow). His research and publications focus on Aramaic, Classical Hebrew, North-West Semitic epigraphy and Syriac charms. Currently, he is leading two projects: to create a comprehensive inventory of Syriac charms; to develop and update an electronic corpus of literary Christian Urmi Neo-Aramaic. He is also undertaking documentation of the Neo-Aramaic dialects in Russia.
Alexey Muraviev
Researching Syro-Persian Christian community in the medieval Central Asia: marriage custom according to unique manuscript witness
Bio: Alexey Muraviev is a Professor of Late Antique and Medieval History at HSE University (Moscow) and a DFG Fellow at the University of Tübingen. He specialises in the history and philology of the early Medieval Christian Orient, patristics, hagiography, and history of science and philosophy and teaches Late Antique history, history of Near Eastern Religions, Syriac, Greek, Georgian and Arabic languages. His main areas of interest cover Syriac, Christian Arabic, Georgian, Armenian and Ethiopic. He studied under Michel van Esbroeck and Sergei Averintsev. He received fellowships the CNRS (Paris), Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, University of Munich and IAS, Princeton. He authored several books, mainly on Syriac and other Oriental Christian matters.