Alumni Fellows

Jon Beltz recently completed his PhD in Assyriology at Yale University. His research focuses on the religion and literature of ancient Mesopotamia, and in particular the nature of deities and demons and exorcistic magical texts. His dissertation, Namtar: Deity, Demon, Agent of Fate, examines the roles and nature of a Mesopotamian chthonic figure, Namtar, a sort of grim reaper in Mesopotamian mythology. He also has a forthcoming article publishing several Sumerian amuletic incantations and has worked on the function of inscribed amulets in ancient Mesopotamia. At the MagEIA Centre for Advanced Studies he will begin his next project, an updated edition of a group of Sumerian and bilingual Sumero-Akkadian incantations known as zi–pa₃ incantations.

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Sevgül Çilingir Cesur's area of research is Hittite magical rituals and the comparative analysis of these texts in terms of paraphernalia, concepts of time and space. In her dissertation, she studied a selected group of ritual material from CTH 390-470 with a holistic approach. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität of Würzburg, where she worked on concepts of time in Hittite ritual texts. Dr. Cesur is currently working on the publication of the unpublished Bo fragments from the Anatolian Civilizations Museum in Ankara. Since 2017, she has been a full-time lecturer at Ege University. In her MagEIA project, she will work on subsidiary actors and observe their roles in order to portray the diversity of individuals in Hittite magical practices.

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Paola Dardano's research focuses on historical-comparative linguistics, particularly the Hittite and Greek languages. Her interests include the morphosyntax and phraseology of Indo-European languages, the theory and methods of etymology, the Indo-European poetic language, and contact linguistics. She was a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the University of Cologne from 2008-2009. Since December 2019 she has been a full professor at the Università per Stranieri di Siena. In her MagEIA project she will examine the terminology and phraseology of Hittite magical texts.

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Korshi Dosoo received his doctorate in ancient history at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia in 2015. He has since been ATER (lecturer) at the University of Strasbourg, post-doctoral researcher on the Labex RESMED project “Les mots de la paix”, and from 2018-2023 was the leader of the junior research group “The Coptic Magical Papyri: Vernacular Religion in Late Antique and Early Islamic Egypt” at the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg. His research focuses on magic and lived religion in Egypt from the Ptolemaic to Mamluk periods as revealed by papyrological and epigraphic sources. His work on the MagEIA project will explore the question of the development and representation of magic in Christian Egypt.

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Spencer Elliott is a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven, funded by the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO). His research focuses on the social and historical dimensions of prayers and incantations within archives of the late first millennium BCE. By looking at prayer texts from Late Babylonian Uruk, Persian-period Egypt, and the book of Psalms, he aims to write a history of how traditionally written prayers are collected and practiced in this period of social and political turmoil. At MagEIA, he will examine the textual archives of ritual specialists from Late Babylonian Uruk.

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José Marcos Macedo is a Professor of Greek Language and Literature at the University of São Paulo (Brazil). His primary research focuses on Greek religious language, Greek linguistics, and Indo-European poetics and phraseology. As part of the MagEIA project, he is compiling an annotated lexicon of the divine epithets found in the Greek magical papyri, cross-referencing them with other relevant epithets from epigraphic, lexicographic, and literary sources up to the 4th/5th century CE. The lexicon will also feature “onomastic sequences” that include participles and relative clauses, as well as phraseological parallels (both within and beyond the magical papyri), formulas, and syntagmatic chains of epithets. The lexicon’s appendices will offer, among other things, a list of compound epithets categorized by their first and second elements, a semantic index, and an in-depth analysis of word formation in compound words.

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Mersha Mengistie is an Ethiopian studies scholar, philologist and literary scholar. He has been an associate professor at Addis Ababa University since 2018. After completing his teaching diploma, he started working as a teacher in 1995 before completing a B.A. and M.A. degree in Language, Literature and Foreign Languages. In 2010, he received his PhD in Ethiopian Studies from the University of Hamburg (DAAD scholarship). He also obtained a Master's degree in Social Work in 2023.
From 2018 to 2021, he was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow and conducted research on the Parchment Saints project, which is currently being prepared for publication at Brill. It examines the lives of Ethiopian saints in manuscript tradition. He then received a further scholarship from the Gerda Henkel Foundation to document ancient education systems in Ethiopia.
In addition to his research, Mengistie is supervising several doctoral projects and is involved in cultural studies and educational policy initiatives throughout Ethiopia.

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Bill Rebiger is a scholar in Jewish studies with a special focus on Jewish magic and Kabbalah. He has published widely, including editions of two prominent treatises of Jewish magic: Sefer Shimmush Tehillim or ‘Book of the Magical Use of Psalms’ and Sefer ha-Razim or ‘Book of Secrets.’ In his MagEIA project, he would like to develop a theory of performative haptic acts for the phenomenon of magical-ritual healing through the physical touch of a miracle healer or other charismatic personality, as attested in late antique Jewish and Christian texts.

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Her project with MagEIA, "Tools of Medicine: Materials in Medical-Magical Spells", addresses the correspondence between medical-magical texts and material culture by examining the relationship between Hieratic medical-magical texts of mainly the Middle and New Kingdoms and the objects pertaining to them, taking a diachronic lens. This research branches off of her dissertation, Changes and Continuity: Ancient Egyptian Birth Practices from the Middle Kingdom through the New Kingdom, which examined the textual evidence and material culture of ancient Egyptian birth and fertility traditions through a diachronic lens. By examining the correspondence between medical-magical texts and material culture, this project aims to render a more complete understanding of daily-life magic.

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Gaby Abou Samra is Professor of Epigraphy and Semitic Studies at the Lebanese University, Beirut. His research focuses on the iconographic and textual analysis of magic bowls in Aramaic, Syriac and Mandaean. Particular attention is paid to morphology and syntax in order to enable philological analyses and comparisons with other Semitic texts (e.g. Bible, Talmud, rabbinic literature). Prof. Abou Samra's research focuses on Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic inscriptions.
His research at MagEIA will focus on the contents of magical bowls: iconography and texts (Aramaic, Syriac, and Mandaic). He will point out several grammatical targets: morphology, syntax, philological commentary, comparative studies with other semitic texts (Bible, Talmud, Rabbinic literature…).

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