Current Fellows

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.

CV and Publications

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.

CV and Publications

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.

CV and Publications

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.

CV and Publications