Current Fellows

Abdelhaleem Awadallah received his doctorate in Ancient Egyptian Religion from Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg (JMU) in 2022. He then worked as a lecturer in Ancient Egyptian Language and Religion at Suez Canal University, Egypt, until November 2023. Since December 2023, he has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Egyptology at Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg. His research focuses on the function and development of death masks in ancient Egypt. A particular focus is on the scientific publication of three previously unpublished masks from the Ismailiah Museum (Egypt) and the Privat Museum (Tokyo, Japan). As a member of the MagEIA research group, his research is dedicated to the investigation of magical concepts and practices as they are handed down in early Egyptian textual sources, including the Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead. A particular focus is on the analysis of their representation, function, and effect in the sources of the New Kingdom.

CV and Publications

Roxanne Bélanger Sarrazin received her doctorate in religious studies (University of Ottawa) and in linguistics, literature, and translation studies (Université Libre de Bruxelles) in 2020. Her revised dissertation, Les divinités gréco-égyptiennes dans les textes magiques coptes, which deals with the appropriation of ancient magical practices by Christians and the processes of religious transformation in late antique Egypt, will soon be published by Peeters in the Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta series. From 2021 to 2024, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project APOCRYPHA (University of Oslo), followed by a junior fellowship at the DFG Center Beyond Canon (University of Regensburg). Her research on Coptic apocrypha, magic, and liturgy is culminating in the monograph Apocrypha, Magic, Liturgy. She is also a member of the Philae Temple Graffiti Project. During her stay at MagEIA, she is researching Coptic medical-magical texts and investigating their “vocabulary of healing” in the context of cultural and linguistic exchange processes.

CV and Publications

Neda Darabian recently defended her doctoral dissertation at the Center for Religious Studies, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, where she explored Jewish-Christian-Zoroastrian encounters in West Asia during Late Antiquity. Her research focuses on discourses surrounding magic in both literary and material sources written in Aramaic, Armenian, Syriac, and Middle Persian. She is particularly interested in the social function of magical accusations and the ways in which magic operated as a discursive category in late antique societies.

As part of the MagEIA project, she is working on the identification and classification of distinct types of magic specialists that emerged within the Sasanian world. Her research also aims to develop a more nuanced understanding of how magic, magical practices, and demonic entities were conceptualized by Jewish and Christian practitioners of magic.

CV and Publications

Christopher Athanasious Faraone is the Edward Olson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Chicago, where he has taught for the last thirty-three years. His recent books include The Transformation of Greek Amulets in Roman Imperial Times (2018) and Women and Children First: The Earliest Evidence for Ancient Greek Body Amulets, István Hahn Lectures 7 (Budapest 2019). He is co-editor (with S. Torallas Tovar) of The Greco-Egyptian Magical Formularies (2022) and The Greco-Egyptian Magical Formularies: Libraries, Books and Individual Recipes (2022).  Faraone has twice been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Humanities and has also won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. He has also been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton (twice), the Getty Research Center in Malibu and the Institut d’Etudes Avancées in Paris. 

CV and Publications

Reuven Kiperwasser specializes in rabbinic literature. He is a research associate Ben Gurion University in Negev and teaching in Polis, Institute for Humanites, Jerusalem. His research interests include the interactions between Iranian mythology, Syriac-Christian storytelling, rabbinic narrative, and trans-cultural relationships between textual communities of Late Antiquity. Schechter publishing house published his critical edition of Kohelet Rabbah (7-12) with an introduction and commentary in 2021. Braun Judaic Studies published his book Going West: Migrating Personae and Construction of the Self in Rabbinic Culture in 2021. A collection of papers he edited with Geoffrey Herman Expressions of Skeptical Topoi in (Late) Ancient Judaism was published by De Gruyter in 2021.  A new book written together with S. Ruzer and A. Kofsky, titled: Late Antique Jewish and Christian Travelogues was published in 2025 by De Gruyter.

In the framework of MagEIA Reuven Kiperwasser intends to explore the fragile relationships between Rabbinic literature and the roughly contemporary magic texts on incantation bowls. Rabbinic literature includes numerous references to magical practices, expressions and  customs, sometimes disdainfully, sometimes with approval. The Rabbis, as others who lived in a world inhabited by evil forces, tried to cope with its demons, as the authors of incantation texts do. Kipperwasser dealt with this topic in “Solomon and Ashmedai Redux”, JQR 111.1(2021), 21-54 and in “The King of Demons in the Universe of the Rabbis”, Demons in Judaism and Christianity: Characters, Characteristics, and Demonic Exegesis. Edited by Hector M. Patmore and Josef Lössl, 274-293. Recently he has dealt with the shared literary world of Babylonian rabbis and the authors of the incantation texts in “The Rabbinic Body in Magical Texts of the Incantation Bowls” in Aramaic Incantation Bowls in Their Late Antique Jewish Contexts. Alexander W. Marcus, Jason S. Mokhtarian, editors, Brown Judaic Studies, 165-184

CV and Publications

Sofie Schiødt obtained her doctorate in Egyptology at the University of Copenhagen in 2021, and has since held postdoctoral positions at the University of Copenhagen (2021–2022) and Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen (2022–2024). Schiødt’s research focuses on social history, medicine and magic, science and technology, and funerary practices. She has produced text editions of three hieratic medical manuscripts in the Papyrus Carlsberg Collection, including the editio princeps of the second-longest medical text surviving from Egypt. Within the MagEIA project, she will investigate how the natural environment was integrated into magical practices, focusing on the role of landscapes and places in the performance of magic in Egypt, informed by comparative perspectives from other historical disciplines and anthropology.

CV and Publications

Sofía Torallas Tovar is Professor at the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and Professor Emerita of Classics at the University of Chicago. Over the past ten years, she has collaborated with Christopher Faraone on the project “Transmission of Magical Knowledge,” dedicated to the reedition and thorough study of Greco-Egyptian magical papyri. Their work was recently recognized with the Goodwin Award of Merit from the Society of Classical Studies (USA). At the MagEIA center they will continue working on the project with the aim of submitting to press the second volume of editions, containing GEMF 55-59 (PGM III, IV and V), to California Classical Studies.

CV and Publications