in progress
Nicolas Atas
Bio: Nicolas Atas graduated in Ancient Oriental Languages and Literatures from UCLouvain (Belgium) and in Semitic languages from the Freie Universität zu Berlin (Germany). He is currently a PhD candidate at KU Leuven working Elias of Nisibis and the Book of the Interpreter, supervised by Philip Forness. He is also collaborating with the GREgORI Project and the eCSCO (Peeters Publishers), working on Syriac lemmatization. His research interest lay mostly in the language changes in the Middle East and especially in the Syriac communities.
Anna Canton
Bio: Anna Canton is a second-year Ph.D. candidate at the Sapienza University of Rome in a joint degree (co–tutela) with the Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies (PISAI, Rome). Her research centers on al-Daǧǧāl and ‘Īsā b. Maryam in the thought of al-Qurṭubī (d. 1273). She holds a M.A. in History (Padua University, 2007), an M.A. in Religious Sciences (Istituto Superiore di Scienze Religiose of Padua, 2015) and a Licentiate in Arabic and Islamic Studies (PISAI, 2019). Her research interests include Classical Qur’anic exegesis and commentary, Christian-Muslim apologetics, and interreligious relations during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.
Giovanni Gomiero
Bio: Giovanni Gomiero is a FWO-PhD Fellow at the University of Ghent (BE), with a project on East Syrian Historiography and Hagiography (title: Thomas of Marga and the Book of Superiors: texts, formation and socio-cultural context of an East-Syrian bishop in the mid-ninth century), supervised by Peter Van Nuffelen and Vittorio Berti. He works on Late Antique Middle East, in particular on the History of Eastern Christianity and its monasticism, related to the fall of the Sasanian Empire and the arrival of the Umayyads and the Abbasids. He has worked at the IRHT-CNRS (Paris) on Syriac codicology and paleography, and for the Beth Mardutho Institute (Princeton, US) as Digital Humanities Seibel Fellow.
Hayarpi Hakobyan
Bio: Hayarpi Hakobyan graduated from the department of Art history at Yerevan State University, with a specialisation in medieval Armenian art. She is currently a doctoral research fellow at the Mesrop Centre for Armenian Studies at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. Her academic interests cover medieval Armenian art in the Lake Van region and its references to Eastern Christian and Middle Eastern art.
Maria Hsu
Bio: Maria HSU is a doctoral student of the Faculty of Oriental Ecclesiastical Studies at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome, Italy. Her research focuses on the reconstruction of Christianity along the Silk Routes in Tang China.
Zumrad Ilyasova
Bio: Zumrad Ilyasova studied Art History, Ancient History and History of Textile Arts at the Universities of Heidelberg and Bern. She is currently a PhD candidate at the eikones Graduate School at the University of Basel and member of the ERC funded Project Global Horizons in Pre-Modern Art at the University of Bern. She was also a visiting graduate student at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. Zumrad’s work focuses on the representation of textile objects in Sogdian wall painting, in which she aims to critically reevaluate the conceptual roles of silk on the Silk Roads and explore the intermedial dialogue between visual and material manifestations of silk in Sogdian culture.
Martino Masolo
Bio: Martino Masolo is a Master degree student at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, his bachelor thesis’s title was Rumi and the Icon. Considerations on the visual culture in the Sultanate of Rum. His main interest is researching cross-cultural phenomena in the Middle East between the Islamic cultures and literatures and the Eastern Churches in a diachronic perspective.
Giorgia Nicosia
Bio: Giorgia Nicosia is a PhD student at Ghent University and at the EPHE (Paris). She graduated in Classics at the University of Siena (B.A.) and Padua (M.A.), and since 2020 she is part of the project: ‘This Story may provide Proof. History and Authority in Syriac Excerpt Collection and beyond’. Her main research interest lies in the studying of translation techniques from Syriac into Greek, as well as in the formation and circulation of Syriac historiographical excerpt collections.
Natalia Sergeeva
Bio: Natalia Sergeeva is a PhD Candidate at the University of Cologne and writes about the reception of Old Russian music in the East and West. She has studied Old Russian music at the St Petersburg Conservatoire and Medieval History at HSE University (Moscow). She is interested in comparative studies of ancient musical traditions, where both liturgical texts and musical notations are being analyzed.