Notes on Contributors

Simon Brelaud received his PhD from Sorbonne University in 2018, with a thesis on Christianity in the Sasanian Empire (third–seventh century), which he has extended to include the post-Sassanian Christians. His other research interests oscillate around the history of Christianity in the Levant and Christianity among the Arabs. He has been involved in several expeditions to Iraqi Kurdistan, Jordan and Turkey, and in the “Recueil des Inscriptions Syriaques–Turquie” and “E-Twoto,” a project in Syriac palaeography. He held a fellowship at the Universität Tübingen and is currently Avimalek Betyousef Visiting Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley.

Françoise Briquel Chatonnet is a historian of the Eastern Mediterranean, in particular Syria, Phoenicia, and Mesopotamia. She earned her PhD from the Université Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne) in 1988. Since then, she has been conducting research on a variety of themes, most prominently focussing on Syriac manuscripts, early Christian literature, Phoenician epigraphy, and cultural exchange between the Graeco-Roman and Semitic cultures. She is also in charge of the project “Recueil des inscriptions syriaques.” In 2021 she was appointed a member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres.

Jennifer Cromwell is a researcher whose interests lie in the social and economic history of Egypt in Late Antiquity and the early Islamic period (4th to 9th centuries CE), especially at a village level. Her work has focused on evidence based on Coptic textual sources and includes diverse topics, such as the publication of non-literary documents, studies on scribal training and practices, the use of language in early Islamic Egypt, administrative structures, monasticism, and a range of daily life topics. Her 2017 monograph, Recording Village Life: A Coptic Scribe in Early Islamic Egypt (Ann Arbor), is a detailed study of the work of an 8th-century Egyptian scribe, incorporating papyrological analysis of his documents with an examination of his connections at both local and regional levels. She is currently a Reader in Ancient History at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Eleonora Cussini is a scholar whose main research interests include Aramaic epigraphy, Palmyrene studies, and ancient law. She received the PhD in Near Eastern Studies from the Johns Hopkins University (1993). She has published widely on themes in Aramaic and Palmyrene epigraphy and palaeography, Aramaic legal language, women’s roles and their representation according to Aramaic documents and inscriptions, and aspects of Palmyrene social history. She is a co-author of the book Palmyrene Aramaic Texts, Publications of the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon Project III (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) and an editor of the volume A Journey to Palmyra: Collected Studies to Remember Delbert R. Hillers (Brill, 2005). She is currently an Adjunct Professor of Semitic Philology at the Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia.

Jimmy Daccache received her PhD from the Université Paris Sorbonne—Paris IV in 2013. Her research is focused on Northwest Semitic civilisations through epigraphy, as well as on the Syriac and Arabic translations of Greek works into Near Eastern languages, especially the treatises of Galen which she explored as a postdoc in the ERC-funded project “Floriental: From Babylon to Baghdad: Towards a History of the Herbal in the Near East.” She has also carried out fieldwork for a number of French–Syrian epigraphic expeditions, and is presently a member of two projects dealing with Syriac epigraphy, “Recueil des Inscriptions Syriaques–Turquie” and “E-Twoto,” a project on Syriac palaeography. She is currently a Senior Lector at Yale University.

Piotr Głogowski received his PhD in Ancient History from the University of Wrocław, Poland (2021). His academic interests include Phoenicia in Graeco-Roman times, Achaemenid studies, Ancient Greek literature, and Greek and Semitic epigraphy. He is a principal investigator in the project “The Development of the Epigraphic Culture of the Near-Eastern Peoples in the Greco-Roman Period: The Case-Study of the Southern Levant (Phoenicia, Judaea–Palestine and Transjordan),” carried out within the Preludium 19 programme funded by the National Science Centre, Poland. He is also the author of a chapter “The Epigraphic Curve in the Levant: The Case Study of Phoenicia” which appeared in the volume Epigraphic Culture in the Eastern Mediterranean in Antiquity, edited by Prof. K. Nawotka (Routledge, 2020). Głogowski currently holds a postdoctoral position at the University of Wrocław and participates in the NAWA Chair project “From the Achaemenids to the Romans: Contextualizing empire and its longue-durée developments,” directed by Prof. R. Rollinger.

Scott F. Johnson is a historian of late antique literature and culture. He works primarily with Greek, Syriac, and Coptic. He received his B.A. in Classical Languages at Vanderbilt and his D.Phil. in Classics from Oxford. Johnson has published widely on late antique literature and culture, including the monographs The Life and Miracles of Thekla, A Literary Study (Harvard, 2006) and Literary Territories: Cartographical Thinking in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2016). He edited a major, 30-chapter volume The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2012), as well as the volumes Greek Literature in Late Antiquity: Dynamism, Didacticism, Classicism (Ashgate, 2006), and Languages and Cultures of Eastern Christianity: Greek (Ashgate, 2015). He is the translator of Jacob of Sarug’s Homily on the Sinful Woman (Gorgias, 2013), in Syriac, and the co-translator of Miracle Tales from Byzantium (Harvard, 2012), in Greek. He is currently an Associate Professor of Classics and Letters, Joseph F. Paxton Presidential Professor, and the Chair of the Department of Classics and Letters at the University of Oklahoma.

Sean V. Leatherbury is Assistant Professor and Ad Astra Fellow in the School of Art History and Cultural Policy, University College Dublin. His research focuses on Roman and late antique art in the eastern Mediterranean, and engages with the relationship between art and text, issues of identity and geography (“regionalism,” “provincialism”), and the transformation of the so-called minor arts from paganism to Christianity. His first monograph, Inscribing Faith in Late Antiquity: Between Reading and Seeing (Routledge, 2020), examines the visual functions of texts inscribed within Christian, Jewish, and early Islamic buildings across the Mediterranean.

Yuliya Minets is a scholar whose research focuses on the intersection of early Christian studies, history, classics, and linguistics. She received the degree of Candidate in History (Kyiv, 2011), and a PhD in Early Christian Studies from the Catholic University of America (2017). Her first monograph, The Slow Fall of Babel: Languages and Identities in Late Antique Christianity (Cambridge University Press, 2022) explores early Christian ideas about foreign languages, linguistic history, and linguistic diversity that are attested in Greek, Syriac, and Latin literary traditions in Late Antiquity and inquires into how the arrival of Christianity changed the ways in which Mediterranean and Near Eastern elites experienced and conceptualized linguistic differences. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Classics at the University of Alabama.

Paweł Nowakowski is a historian and epigraphist of the late antique period. His research interests focus on the use of inscriptions as an instrument of the cult of saints and as evidence for the study of multilingualism in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. He received his doctoral degree in History at the University of Warsaw in 2015. Between 2015 and 2018, he was a research associate at the University of Oxford, working on the project “The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity,” and in 2018 he published his monograph “Inscribing the Saints in Late Antique Anatolia.” He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ancient History at the University of Warsaw, and PI of the Project “Epigraphy and Identity in the Early Byzantine Near East” (NCN, Poland, 2019/35/D/HS3/01872). In 2022, he was awarded an ERC Starting grant for the project “Masters of the stone: The stonecutters’ workshops and the rise of the late antique epigraphical cultures (third–fifth century AD)” (2022–2027).

Przemysław Piwowarczyk is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. His research is focused on the social aspects of widely understood Christian communities in Roman and Byzantine Egypt (including Gnostics and Manichaeans). He is an author of Lexicon of Spiritual Powers in the Nag Hammadi “Library” in the Light of the Texts of Ritual Power (Katowice 2021) and numerous contributions in journals and multi-author volumes. He is a principal investigator in the project “Embodied religion of laypeople in late ancient Egypt” founded by the Polish Science Centre and an investigator in the project “Monks and Monastic Communities in Eastern Mediterranean (4th–8th c.),” led by Ewa Wipszycka-Bravo.

Flavia Ruani earned her PhD in religious studies from EPHE, Paris and La Sapienza, Università di Roma, exploring anti-Manichaean polemics of Ephrem of Nisibis. Her research involves the study of religion, Syriac language, manuscripts, and literature, with a focus on the medieval period (fourth–thirteenth century). She is also a member of two epigraphic projects: “Recueil des Inscriptions Syriaques–Turquie” and “E-Twoto,” a project on Syriac palaeography. Her recent volume co-edited with Sergey Minov, Syriac Hagiography: Texts and Beyond (Brill 2021), collects essays in Syriac hagiographical literature. Since 2018, she has been a member of the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes, CNRS.

Joanna Wilimowska is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Archaeology, University of Warsaw (Poland). She received PhD in Ancient History from the University of Wrocław (Poland) in 2019. She specialises in documentary papyrology and epigraphy with a particular focus on the social and economic history of Ptolemaic Egypt. She currently coordinates a research project entitled Priests and temple personnel in Ptolemaic Egypt: social and economic aspects funded by the National Science Centre, Poland. Her publications include Benefactions toward temples in the Ptolemaic Fayum (JARCE 54, 2018) and Sacred animal cult workers in the Ptolemaic Fayum (JJP 50, 2020). She is also a contributor to the most recent volume on the epigraphic culture in the Eastern Mediterranean in antiquity (2021).