Hosts and Guests 2025
Benedikt Peschl and Jaime Martínez Porro host Angelica Gaspari (April-June 2025)
Benedikt Peschl, Jaime Martínez Porro, Angelica Gaspari
Benedikt Peschl and Jaime Martínez Porro (Institute of Iranian Studies) host Angelica Gaspari (Sapienza-Università di Roma), who is currently preparing a text-critical edition of Part 2 of the Dādestān ī Dēnīg (DD), a significant 9th-century text in Middle Persian written by the Zoroastrian high priest Manuščihr. The second part of this text contains extensive information on Zoroastrian ritual practice, a main research area of J. Martínez Porro at the Corpus Avesticum Berolinense (CAB) project. B. Peschl is currently finalizing an article on afterlife beliefs in the DD. In the context of the Zoroastrian Middle Persian Corpus and Dictionary project (MPCD), he is preparing a translation of selected sections of Book 8 of the 9th/10th-century compendium Dēnkard, which likewise cover themes in common with the DD.
The outcomes of this scholarly exchange will be incorporated into forthcoming articles of the hosts, as well as Gaspari’s PhD dissertation (expected completion: late 2025).
Jaime Martínez Porro is a postdoctoral researcher at the Corpus Avesticum Berolinense (CAB) at the Institute of Iranian Studies. His dissertation, defended in 2020 and forthcoming for publication, explores the relationship between recitation and orthography in Avestan manuscripts. His primary research areas include Avestan orthography, the study of Avestan manuscripts and codicology, and the analysis of rituals of the Zoroastrian Long Liturgy.
Benedikt Peschl works as a postdoctoral researcher for the project Zoroastrian Middle Persian Corpus and Dictionary (MPCD) at the Institute of Iranian Studies. His research focusses on the Middle Persian translations and late antique exegesis of the Avesta and their impact on later Zoroastrian literature.
Angelica Gaspari holds an MA in Oriental Archaeology from Sapienza University of Rome, where she currently conducts a PhD in Philology and History of the Ancient World. Her dissertation topic is a critical edition, translation and commentary of questions 41–92 of the 9th-c. CE Zoroastrian Middle Persian text Dādestān ī Dēnīg.
Programme:
Each second Monday starting the 14th April (12h-16h with break), open workshop sessions on the Middle Persian text Dādestān ī Dēnīg and Zoroastrian rituals. Sessions are scheduled for 14th April, 28th April, 12th Mai, 26th May, 5nd June (Thursday, 16-20h, instead of Whit Monday), 16th June.
Wednesday 23rd April (16h-18h), guest lecture by A. Gaspari in the frame of the research colloquium of the Institute of Iranian Studies.
Wednesday 25th Juni (16h-18h), public roundtable discussion with A. Gaspari, B. Peschl and J. Martínez Porro; presentation of the results achieved.
All events will be conducted in English.
Tina Beck hosts Alan Crivellaro, Flavio Ruffinatto, and Monika Zöller-Engelhardt (May 2025)
Tina Beck, Alan Crivellaro, Flavio Ruffinatto, Monika Zöller-Engelhardt
Wood identification of ancient Egyptian objects is rarely carried out in Egyptology and relies mainly on sampling and microscopic methods. The aim of the joint research of the Egyptologists Tina Beck (FU Berlin), Monika Zöller-Engelhardt (JGU Mainz) and the wood anatomists Alan Crivellaro and Flavio Ruffinatto (both Turin) is not only to fill this gap, but also to provide a comprehensive guide to the macroscopic wood identification of ancient Egyptian objects, focusing on wooden figures from the 3rd millennium BCE. The group has been working together since February 2024 and has so far studied wooden figures at the Egyptian collections in Berlin and Turin. In May 2025 the group will come together again in Berlin to resume their work in the collection of the Neues Museum Berlin, to review their data collected so far and to conduct a one-day workshop “Inside Ancient Egyptian Wood” on May 23rd at Freie Universität Berlin.
Tina Beck studied Social and Cultural Anthropology and Egyptology at Freie Universität Berlin and has been a research assistant at the Institute of Egyptology since 2015. She has been working with the Asyut Project at the ancient Egyptian necropolis of Asyut since 2011 and completed her PhD on wooden statues from the First Intermediate Period and the Middle Kingdom (2205–1630 BC) in 2023. Her research interests include material culture studies, human-thing relations, history of research and postcolonialism. In her studies she focuses on the Old and Middle Kingdom of ancient Egypt, the region of Middle Egypt, ancient Egyptian funerary practices and wooden objects.
Alan Crivellaro is a wood biologist with over twenty years of experience in research and teaching activities related to wood. He studied wood science and forestry at the University of Padova (Italy) from 1999 to 2007, completing his PhD on the wood, bark, and pith anatomy of trees and shrubs from the island of Cyprus. His PhD was co-supervised by Prof. Fritz H. Schweingruber. Alan has worked as a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at various universities and research centres in Italy, Switzerland, Estonia, Romania, and the UK between 2012 and 2021. He has been a professor of wood science at the University of Torino (Italy) since 2022, concentrating his research and teaching activities on wood identification and properties. Alan is renowned for his ability to explain complex and seemingly intricate subjects, which has garnered widespread interest both within and outside the scientific community.
Flavio Ruffinatto is a Research Fellow at the Department of Agricultural, Forestry and Food Sciences (DISAFA) of the University of Turin. His main research interests include wood anatomy and properties, macroscopic and microscopic wood identification, forensic wood identification, archaeological wood identification, diagnostics and conservation of wooden cultural heritage. He has extensive experience in teaching wood technology, wood anatomy, and wood identification to academic and vocational students.
Monika Zöller-Engelhardt is Senior Researcher and Lecturer in the Department of Egyptology in the Institute of Ancient Studies (IAW) at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. She is a member of the Thematic Area 1 ‘Umsorgtes Leben’ in the profile area ’40,000 Years of Human Challenges. Perception, Conceptualisation, Coping in Premodern Societies’ with the her current project “Concepts of 'Sorge' (care) in the ancient Egyptian funerary culture” and project leader of the “Ancient Sciences Innovation Lab” (https://asil.uni-mainz.de). She conducts research on methodological and theoretical approaches to the material culture of ancient Egypt, especially in the (Middle Egyptian) funerary culture, and has a specific focus the analysis of wooden objects. She is also interested in language change and linguistic typology of Ancient Egyptian. She combines her specialisations in the study of care practices and coping with challenges in ancient Egypt.
Luc Wodzicki hosts Emanuele Giusti (May & June 2025)
Emanuele Giusti, Luc Wodzicki
The research project ThingScapes explores how landscapes contribute to the transformation of things into objects of knowledge. While things have increasingly been recognized as carriers of knowledge in early modern intellectual history, little research has been done on the role their geographical, cultural, and material context plays in this process. ThingScapes brings together concepts from material culture studies and historical landscape research to show that landscapes are not merely passive backdrops but active ordering systems that shape the epistemic significance of things.
A key innovation of the project is its close integration of theoretical development and interdisciplinary discussion. During Dr. Emanuele Giusti’s fellowship at Freie Universität Berlin, a theoretical and methodological article on ThingScapes will be drafted. This article will be discussed in a closed workshop with experts from various disciplines, refined through their feedback, and ultimately submitted to a renowned academic journal. This process ensures that the concept is not only theoretically sound but also applicable across different research fields.
Luc Wodzicki is a postdoctoral researcher in Early Modern History at the Friedrich Meinecke Institute, Freie Universität Berlin (Chair of Prof. Dr. Daniela Hacke). Following his PhD on transculturality in the Mediterranean, with a focus on Italian-Ottoman relations, his current research explores the history of things, knowledge, and landscapes in Italy, Prussia, and England. Through various collaborative and experimental formats, he develops new approaches to an early modern history of landscapes, emphasizing material, sensory, and knowledge cultures as key factors in shaping the concept of landscape.
Emanuele Giusti is Teaching Assistant in Early Modern History at the University of Florence. His works explores transcultural relations between Europe and Asia, with a particular focus on the Persianate world in the long eighteenth century. His research examines the interplay between the study of the past, travel writing, and encyclopaedic literature, aiming to integrate the analysis of visual, material, and environmental elements into intellectual history and the history of historiography by highlighting the role they played in early modern processes of knowledge-making. His first book, Le quaranta colonne. Le rovine di Persia nella cultura europea del diciottesimo secolo, will be published in 2025.
Vasiliki Chamourgiotaki and Aurélie Bischofberger host Miriam Hjälm, Adrian Pirtea, Juan Pedro Monferrer Sala, Peter Tarras, Alexander Treiger und Emanuele Zimbardi (June 2025)
Aurélie Bischofberger, Vasiliki Chamourgiotak
Vasiliki Chamourgiotaki is organizing a two-day workshop at the Institute of Semitic Studies (Prof. Shabo Talay), Freie Universität Berlin on 19–20 June 2025. The workshop, co-organized with Aurélie Bischofberger, is entitled Monks as Translators. Translation Methods in Early Syro-Arabic Melkite Literature, and aims to explore the translation techniques employed in various genres during the early stages (9th–10th centuries) of the Syro-Arabic Melkite translation movement.
More specifically, the workshop will focus on identifying linguistic features that can help attribute Syro-Arabic translations to specific translators or regions. It will also explore broader translation trends across different genres over the specified period and evaluate the impact of scribes on textual transmission.
Vasiliki Chamourgiotaki (Freie Universität Berlin) is a doctoral researcher at the Seminar for Semitic Studies and a research associate in the project Aristotle’s Poetics in the West (of India) from Antiquity to the Renaissance at the Seminar for Arabic Studies. Her doctoral thesis, Früh-christlich-arabische Übersetzungen der syrischen patristischen Literatur in der melkitischen Gemeinde, examines the reception of the works of the Miaphysite Jacob of Serugh by the Melkites. In particular, she edits and translates the Syriac original and the Melkite Arabic translation of two of his metrical homilies, On What Our Lord Said “You Should Not Swear at All” and On the Council of Nicaea, focusing on the translation technique of the Arabic translations and their philological description.
Aurélie Bischofberger (University of Münster/Freie Universität Berlin) is a doctoral researcher supported by the Gerda Henkel Foundation. Her dissertation project, supervised by Prof. Christophe Nihan (University of Münster) and Prof. Meira Polliack (Tel Aviv University), is titled The Arabic Versions of Leviticus 11: A Comprehensive Approach of Manuscript Evidence, Translation Techniques and Genetic Affiliations. It investigates key aspects of several Syriac-based translations of the book of Leviticus, offering a critical reassessment of methodologies applied in previous studies on the Arabic Bible. By combining manuscript analysis with a refined methodological framework, her work seeks to enlighten the processes of textual translation and transmission in the medieval period.
Invited guests:
- Miriam Hjälm, Senior Lecturer at the Sankt Ignatios College and Researcher in the Department of Linguistics and Philology at Uppsala University
- Adrian Pirtea, Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grand project Reviving the Ascetic Ideal in the Eastern Mediterranean at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Institute for Medieval Research)
- Juan Pedro Monferrer Sala, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Córdoba, Spain
- Peter Tarras, Research Assistant in the Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Munich
- Alexander Treiger, Professor in the Department of Classics with Arabic and Religious Studies at Dalhousie University, Canada
- Emanuele Zimbardi, Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Turin, Italy
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Mahmoud Al-Zayed hosts Hala Halim, Annette Lienau and Dilip Menon (July 2025)
Mahmoud Al-Zayed, Hala Halim, Annette Lienau, Dilip Menon
This workshop "What was/is Afro-Asianism?" investigates the neglected history and the theoretical articulations of Afro-Asianism in the aftermath of the famous Bandung Conference held in Indonesia in 1955. It stems partly from the currently growing interest in the global significance of the Bandung conference and the theoretical discourses generated around it. While the Bandung moment was a starting point for a new global agenda revolving around new principles of Indigenous self-determination, world peace, anti-racism, anti-imperialism, and Afro-Asian solidarity, a new discourse called Afro-Asianism emerged in different regions and articulated in different languages of the Third world. The workshop aims to track the political, historical and epistemological grounds of Afro-Asianism as a theory that prefigured the academic debates on postcolonialism and decolonialism and has an intellectual–though largely unacknowledged–impact until today. While both postcolonialism and decolonialism as academic discourses claim the Bandung moment as foundational, they almost totally neglect the foundational texts that attempted to theorize Afro-Asianism. Hence, the workshop examines the meanings and relevance of Afro-Asianism as theorized by various intellectuals, activists, artists, and non-state actors from the Global South. Among the central questions of the workshop will be: What were the meanings of Afro-Asianism? What were its languages and contexts? Were they secular, religious, or both? What are the relations between Afro-Asianism and anticolonialism? What are the moral, political, and economic imperatives of Afro-Asianism in the present? By recontextualizing and thereby rethinking the intellectual and political history of Afro-Asianism as a movement and a theoretical discourse, the workshop revisits the meanings of anticolonialism, anticolonial humanism, global solidarities, south-south comparativism and forms of worldmaking in the Global South.
Hala Halim is an associate professor of Comparative Literature and Middle Eastern Studies at New York University. Her book Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive received an Honorable Mention for the Harry Levin Prize for First Book from the American Comparative Literature Association. Her translation of a novel by Mohamed El-Bisatie, Clamor of the Lake, received an Egyptian State Incentive Award in literature for translation and was selected as runner up for the first London-based Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. Halim’s current book manuscript centers on the Afro-Asian movement and its journal Lotus.
Annette Damayanti Lienau is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Lienau's core research uses the legacy of the Arabic language as a lens for comparative studies of post-colonial literature, offering an alternative approach to framing national literatures in Asia and Africa through primarily European colonial influences. Her first book Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference: Global Arabic and Counter-Imperial Literatures was published with Princeton University Press in 2024. She is currently working on a second book on twenty-first century revolutionary movements and their cultural afterlives, focusing on the literary impact of anti-authoritarian protest movements in Egypt and Indonesia towards the turn of the 21st century. Her research has been supported through fellowships from the NEH, ACLS, and Mellon Foundation. Lienau’s work has appeared in the journals PMLA, Comparative Literature, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Her first book is the subject of a forthcoming essay forum in the journal Comparative Literature Studies. Trained at Yale, Middlebury, and the American University in Cairo, her research uses creative combinations of languages—Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian Colloquial Arabic, Indonesian, and Wolof—to uncover historical connections across Asia and Africa. She has conducted fieldwork in Egypt, Indonesia, Senegal, France, and the Netherlands.
Dilip M Menon is Professor of History and International Relations at the University of Witwatersrand and Director, Centre for Indian Studies in Africa. He works on the themes of knowledge from the global South and oceanic histories. His recent publications include Blindness of Insight: Essays on Caste in Modern India (Navayana, 2024) and the edited volume Cinemas of the Global South: Towards a Southern Aesthetics (Routledge, 2024). In 2021 he was awarded the Falling Walls Foundation Prize for the Social Sciences and Humanities.
Mahmoud Al-Zayed is an Einstein Fellow at the Institute of Islamic Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. He broadly teaches and writes about transregional literature and the intellectual histories of the Global South. His work focuses on African, Arabic, and South Asian literatures and cultures, anticolonialism, critical and literary theory, postcolonial and decolonial theory, as well as modernism in the twentieth century (covering the late colonial and early postcolonial periods). Al-Zayed studied and worked in Syria, India, and Germany. Before joining Freie Universität Berlin, he was a research associate at Jamia Millia Islamia, a central university in New Delhi, India. He recently co-edited the book, Mahasweta Devi in Defence of the Human: The Poetics of Translating Resistance (Routledge, 2025).
Information on further projects and guests will follow.