Current Fellows

Fatma Kaynar Bastici completed her PhD in Hittitology at University of Turin in 2018 with the thesis “I rituali magici ittiti: struttura, classificazione e il ruolo di Kizzuwatna (Hittite Magical Rituals: Structure, Classification and the Role of Kizzuwatna)”. Her research focuses on Hittite magical rituals, in particular those of Hurrian origin. She held the position of an Assistant Prof. at Istanbul University until 2026; currently she holds a teaching position at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”.

Her MagEIA project focuses on examining the materia magica used in rituals of Hurrian origin in connection with the performed ritual actions, in order to elucidate the purpose and effect of the rituals.

CV and Publications

Carina Kühne-Wespi received her doctorate in Egyptology in 2019 and has been an Akademische Mitarbeiterin at the Institute of Egyptology in Heidelberg since 2018. She participated in the German Archaeological Institute’s excavations in Dra’ Abu el-Naga in the Theban necropolis opposite modern Luxor and was a research assistant at the Collaborative Research Cluster “Material Text Cultures” in subprojects on the “Materiality and Presence of Magical Signs” and on “Visual Means of Structure for Egyptian Texts on papyrus”. 

One of her main research interests are ancient Egyptian ritual texts and magical practices. Her dissertation on ancient Egyptian execration figurines and texts (published 2023) focusses on material aspects of rituals that serve to repel hostile forces. As part of her felllowship at MagEIA, she edits and discusses three late hieratic papyri from the papyrus collection of the Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung in Berlin. These fragmentary papyri document three different rituals used by the Egyptian priests to effectuate the protection of the king and to ward off hostile forces. As the god Horus of Hebenu is mentioned several times in two of the texts, one of the aims of her studies is to investigate his role within the mythological concepts expressed in these rituals. 

CV and Publications
 

Diana Míčková received her PhD in Egyptology (2023) and Classical Philology (2025) from Charles University in Prague. Her research focuses primarily on ancient Egyptian religious texts, mythology, and magic: since 2015, she has participated in archaeological excavations at Abusir conducted by the Czech Institute of Egyptology, Charles University, working on the translation and interpretation of texts from the shaft tombs of the Saite-Persian period and preparing their editio princeps. Her research has also addressed the ancient art of memory.

In recent years, she has been a member of several international research projects, including Alchemies of Scent (Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences), where she has focused particularly on texts from the temples at Edfu and Athribis, and Rivers in the Ancient Mediterranean World: Comparative and Interdisciplinary Study (Institute of Greek and Latin Studies, Charles University). She has also participated in the Hieroglyphs Recognition and Translation project, focused on the automated translation of Egyptian hieroglyphic texts using modern technologies (Czech Institute of Egyptology, Charles University).

Within the MagEIA project, she focuses on the ritual and mythological texts on the inner side of the outer sarcophagus from the tomb of Iufaa at Abusir and on preparing these texts for publication. These relatively complex and highly unusual compositions cover a wide range of aspects of ancient Egyptian magical beliefs and practices, including protective and apotropaic rituals, compendia of sacred knowledge, and the performative role of magical utterances. A detailed study of these compositions will contribute not only to a deeper understanding of their language and content, but also has significant potential to advance scholarship on ancient Egyptian religious texts more broadly.

CV and Publications

Theresa Roth has been an assistant professor of Historical and Comparative Linguistics / Indo-European Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin since 2023. She completed her PhD on ‘Religious Communication’ in Umbrian and Hittite at Philipps University of Marburg in 2019. Through her involvement in the university’s interdisciplinary Research Training Group ‘The Staging of Religious Atmosphere in Ancient Cultures’, she has been investigating, since 2023, the role of ritual texts in generating intersubjectively perceptible effects that constitute a religious situation. Her current work within the Collaborative Research Centre ‘Register’ extends beyond the relationship between situational-functional parameters and linguistic variation in Greek medical texts to also encompass linguistic subjectivity and intersubjectivity in epistemic and evaluative utterances. During her fellowship at MagEIA, she is focusing on the study of affective or emotional language in magical texts (Greek and Latin curse tablets, Hittite incantation rituals), thereby combining her expertise in religious text types with her interest in expressions of emotion and phenomena such as ‘appraisal’, ‘attitudinality’ and ‘stance’.

CV and publications

Ulrike Steinert received her doctorate in Ancient Near Eastern Studies from Georg August University of Göttingen in 2007. Her dissertation, Aspects of Humanity in Ancient Mesopotamia: A Study of Person and Identity in the 2nd and 1st Millennia BC (Leiden: Brill), was published in 2012. Since then, she has worked as a postdoctoral researcher on interdisciplinary research projects, including the ERC project BabMed – Babylonian Medicine (2013–2018, FU Berlin) and the Research Training Group 1876 ‘Early Concepts of Man and Nature’ (2018–2022, JGU Mainz). From 2022 to 2026, she was principal investigator in the DFG project ‘Akkadian and Hittite Emotional Concepts in Context (AHEC)’ at JGU Mainz, where she investigated the linguistic domain of emotions in Akkadian texts from Mesopotamia. In her research, Ulrike Steinert focuses in particular on the interrelated fields of ancient Mesopotamian anthropology, ancient Mesopotamian history of knowledge and medicine, and historical emotion research. Her recently published habilitation thesis Women's Healthcare in Ancient Mesopotamia in the First Millennium BCE (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2026) contains a comprehensive analysis and examination of gynaecological cuneiform texts from the 1st millennium BCE, their concepts of the body and illness, and their therapeutic practices in the field of tension between medicine, magic and religion.

As part of the MagEIA project, Ulrike Steinert is investigating emotional metaphors in Akkadian incantations and the rituals associated with them in sources from the 2nd and 1st millennia BC. The focus is on incantations and rituals that explicitly served to control or influence emotional phenomena, such as love spells, incantations to appease anger and ward off hostility, evil demons and harmful spells. The project addresses the question of the extent to which metaphors contribute to cultural models of emotions (or emotion scripts), how linguistic metaphors materialise in magical objects and ritual actions, and how the imagery of magical texts was used as a performative instrument to enable transformations in the psychological states of ritual actors and promote changes in their relationships with their social environment.  

CV and Publications