Notes on Contributors

Thomas Arentzen received his PhD in Church History from Lund University in 2014, and earned his habilitation in Church History at the same institution in 2018. During the academic year 2018–2019 he was a Fellow in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. Currently he is Researcher at Uppsala University, where he conducts the project “Beyond the Garden: An Ecocritical Approach to Early Byzantine Christianity,” funded by the Swedish Research Council. His research focuses on Christian hymns and hagiography in relation to corporeality and ecology. His publications include The Virgin in Song: Mary and the Poetry of Romanos the Melodist (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) and The Reception of the Virgin in Byzantium: Marian Narratives in Texts and Images (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Anahit Avagyan studied theology at Yerevan State University (Armenia) and received her PhD degree from the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg. She has conducted research on Medieval Armenian translations for many years. Her interest focuses on the Armenian translations of the Church Fathers, especially Athanasius of Alexandria and the Armenian collections of Vitae Patrum. Currently she is a researcher in the Mashtots Matenadaran Research Institute of Ancient Manuscripts in Yerevan; she also teaches Patristics and Church History at the Gevorgian Theological Seminary in Etchmiadzin.

Britt Dahlman received her PhD in Greek in 2007 from Lund University. Since then she has worked as a research fellow within three larger projects on Greek manuscripts containing monastic literature. In the collaborative project, “Formative Wisdom. The Reception of Monastic Sayings in European Culture: Scholarly Collaboration on a Digital Platform,” her work included the digital editing and encoding of manuscripts for a relational database of apophthegmatic and monastic literature. Currently she participates in the project “Cultural Evolution of Texts” at Uppsala University. Her publications include Saint Daniel of Sketis (2007) and several studies on and editions of the Apophthegmata Patrum (Paradiset, vols. 4–9 and 15).

James E. Goehring is Professor Emeritus of Religion at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. His research interests focus on early Egyptian monasticism in general, and Upper Egyptian Pachomian monasticism in particular. He was an Alexander von Humboldt fellow and is a past president on the North American Patristics Society. His publications include The Crosby-Schøyen Codex (1990), Ascetics, Society and the Desert (1999), and Politics, Monasticism, and Miracles in Sixth Century Upper Egypt (2012). In retirement he has become an avid birder.

Susan Ashbrook Harvey is the Willard Prescott and Annie McClelland Smith Professor of Religion and History at Brown University, where she has also served as Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence and, presently, as Director of the Program in Early Cultures. A specialist in Syriac and Byzantine Christianity, she has received honorary doctorates from Grinnell College (Iowa), the University of Bern (Switzerland), and Lund University (Sweden), and is a past-President of the Orthodox Theological Society in America and of the North American Patristics Society. She has published widely in academic venues on women in ancient Christianity, asceticism, the cult of saints, hagiography, hymnography, and religion and the senses.

Miriam L. Hjälm holds a PhD in Semitic languages from Uppsala University (2015) and has been a postdoctoral research fellow in the Biblia Arabica project at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (2015–2017). She is currently employed as an Assistant Professor in Easter Christian Studies at the Stockholm School of Theology/Sankt Ignatios College. Her research focuses on Christian Arabic literature in general, and in particular on various aspects of Bible translations as well as the perception and use of the Bible among early Arabic-speaking Christians. Her research interests also include religious encounters as reflected in shared traditions and tacit borrowing among Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians in the Islamic world.

Henrik Rydell Johnsén received his PhD in Church History from Lund University, Sweden. Since 2017 he is senior lecturer and researcher at Stockholm University. His research focuses on late antique monasticism in Palestine and Egypt and includes studies of early monasticism in light of late antique philosophy and education, as well as literary studies of the early monastic genre of chapters. His publications include Reading John Climacus (2007) and various articles on early Egyptian monasticism and late antique philosophy.

Lorenzo Perrone is Professor Emeritus of Early Christian Literature at the University of Bologna. He has studied the history of the Church and monasticism in the Holy Land during Late Antiquity. In the last two decades he mainly worked on Origen and the history of biblical interpretation. Moreover, an ongoing subject of his scholarly interest has been the doctrine of prayer in ancient Christianity. In 1995 he created the international journal Adamantius that specializes in the study of Origen and the Alexandrian tradition. After their discovery in Munich in 2012, he directed the critical edition of twenty-nine new Homilies on the Psalms by Origen (Berlin 2015).

Ute Pietruschka is senior researcher at the Academy of Sciences Göttingen (Germany), where she currently focuses on the project “Cataloguing Oriental Manuscripts in Germany.” She is a lecturer at the University of Halle and the Freie University Berlin. She received her PhD from the University of Halle (Germany). Since 2009 she has directed the project “Corpus of Arabic and Syriac Gnomologia.” Her academic interests include Christian-Arabic and Islamic studies, manuscript studies, the transmission of Greek knowledge in the Islamicate world and Digital Humanities.

Karine Åkerman Sarkisian holds a PhD in Slavonic Languages from Uppsala University. Her research concentrates on the reception of Byzantine hagiography among the Slavs. Her publications include a linguistic analysis and critical edition of the Life of St. Onuphrios, as well as translation studies. In recent years she has explored the reception and text evolution of monastic sayings on Slavic soil within two projects: “Formative Wisdom. The Reception of Monastic Sayings in European Culture: Scholarly Collaboration on a Digital Platform” at Lund University, where she contributed to the development of the relational database by digital editing of apophthegmatic literature; and the project “Cultural Evolution of Texts” at Uppsala University, which integrates phylogenetic network analysis with studies of textual evolution.

Denis M. Searby received his BA and MA in Classics from Columbia University, New York, and his PhD from Uppsala University, Sweden. He was named professor of ancient Greek at Stockholm University in 2012. His research has included studies and editions of Greek gnomologia and anthologies, editorial theory, as well as theological and philosophical interactions between the Latin West and Greek East, especially focused on the statesman and humanist Demetrios Kydones. He has also translated the works of Birgitta of Sweden from Latin into English (4 vols., Oxford University Press).

Peter Toth earned his MA in Egyptology and Classics and his PhD in Classics at the University of Budapest. He worked and published on the various versions and translations of the late-fourth-century monastic collection Historia monachorum. After a ten-year curatorship of medieval manuscripts at the University Library Budapest, he conducted various research projects at The Warburg Institute and King’s College, London before he joined the British Library in 2016 as Curator of Ancient and Medieval Manuscripts. His main interest is in the cultural interaction between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages via translations of texts and ideas.

Andreas Westergren is Researcher and Lecturer at the Centre for Theology and Religious Studies at Lund University. He holds a PhD in Church History from Lund University. After completing his dissertation in 2012, he participated in the long-term research project on “Early Monasticism and Classical Paideia” at Lund University, where his work focused on hagiographical and historiographical sources in light of communal and civic ideals. He published some of the results in “The Monastic Paradox: Desert Ascetics as Founders, Fathers, and Benefactors in Early Christian Historiography,” Vigiliae Christianae 72 (2018). Currently he is part of the research project “Integration and Tradition: The Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church in Sweden,” funded by the Swedish Research Council.

Karin Hedner Zetterholm is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at Lund University. She is the author of Jewish Interpretation of the Bible: Ancient and Contemporary (Fortress Press, 2012); Portrait of a Villain: Laban the Aramean in Rabbinic Literature (Peeters, 2002); and various articles on the relationship between the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies and Judaism and the impact of Jesus-oriented groups on the emergence of a rabbinic Jewish identity.