Notes on Contributors
Nicole Belayche
is Directeure d’études (Pr.) emerita at the department of Sciences religieuses, École Pratique des Hautes Études, PSL (Paris). Her major research fields cover pagan cults and their changes in the Eastern Roman Empire (Anatolia and Near East) – with a focus on religious cohabitations and interactions – and analysis of rituals and their dynamics as a “lieu” shared by theological discourse within classic polytheisms and their social expression. Combining history and anthropology, she recently coedited Puissances divines à l’épreuve du comparatisme (Turnhout, 2017).
Francesco Massa
is an historian of religions specializing in religious interactions in the Roman Empire. He is Assistant Professor in Ancient History at the University of Fribourg where he leads a research project on “Religious Competition in Late Antiquity” funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (2019–2023). He is one of the editors of Asdiwal, a Swiss journal of anthropology and history of religions, and of Mythos, an Italian journal of ancient religions.
Cornelia Isler-Kerényi
(1942), archaeologist, has participated in excavations in Greece and Sicily and has held several teaching positions in Switzerland, Italy, and Paris. Her main field of research is the interpretation of Greek vase-paintings and Dionysos as important subject of ancient Greek religion and society. Monographs, published by Brill: Dionysos in Archaic Greece. An Understanding through Images (2007) and Dionysos in Classical Athens. An Understanding through Images (2015).
Stéphanie Wyler
is Associate Professor of History and Anthropology of the Roman worlds at the University of Paris and researcher at the AnHiMA centre (Anthropologie et Histoire des Mondes Antiques). Her main research interests are images, archaeology and texts relating to religions in classical Rome. Her doctoral research focused on the images of Dionysus in Rome. A list of her publications at: http://www.anhima.fr/spip.php?article558&lang=fr.
Janine Balty
possesses degrees in Classics, History of Art and Archaeology (Free University, Brussels), including a doctorate and habilitation (Université de Franche-Comté, Besançon). She was a researcher at the Centre belge de recherches archéologiques à Apamée de Syrie, from 1968 to 2001 (Brussels), and associate researcher at the Centre H. Stern pour l’étude de la mosaïque antique from 1991 to 2001 (Paris). She wrote several books and articles on iconography, Roman and Byzantine mosaics in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire (Syria, Phoenicia, Arabia, and Palestine), and participated in the annual excavations of Apamea in Syria from 1966 to 2002, and in 2004 and 2006.
Philippa Adrych
studied Classics as an undergraduate at Magdalen College Oxford, before continuing with an MPhil and DPhil in Roman history, also at Oxford. Her doctoral thesis, supervised by Prof. Jaś Elsner, focused on ‘Approaches to the Iconographies and Historiographies of the Roman worship of Mithras’. During her doctorate, she also held a studentship on Empires of Faith, a five-year humanities research project jointly hosted by the British Museum and the University of Oxford, and funded by the Leverhulme Trust. From October–December 2018, she was the Judith Maitland Memorial Awardee at the British School at Rome, where she worked on close comparisons of three Mithraic sites in Italy. She is currently (until July 2020) the recipient of a postdoctoral research grant from the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz.
Richard Veymiers
Ph.D. (Liège, 2008), became the director of the Royal Museum of Mariemont (Belgium) in September 2018 after serving as a research fellow at the French School at Athens, the City of Paris, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and Leiden University. His scholarly interests (exemplified by the volumes of the Bibliotheca Isiaca series, and volumes 187/I–II in the RGRW series) focus on the functioning of visual cultures and their role within the processes of culture-contact, mobility and transference in ancient societies.
Anne-Françoise Jaccottet
Senior lecturer (chargée de cours) in Classical Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Geneva since 2010, she previously taught at the Universities of Lausanne, Neuchâtel, Bâle, Zurich and EPFL, and was Directrice d’Études invitée at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris (Sciences religieuses) at the invitation of Nicole Belayche in 2006. She studied Classical Archaeology, Ancient Greek, and Latin at the University of Lausanne where she completed her doctoral thesis on Dionysiac associations under the direction of Claude Bérard. Her main research areas are Greek and Roman iconography, Greek and Roman religion, dialogue between text and image, especially in religious contexts.
Françoise Van Haeperen
is full professor of ancient history at the UCLouvain (Belgium). Her research focuses on polytheistic cults in the Western Roman world. In addition to numerous articles on the Roman religion, she has published several books, including one on the Pontifical College (3rd century BC–4th century AD), based on her doctoral thesis (Brussels-Rome 2002), one on the foreign and indigenous aspects of the Mother of the Gods (Paris 2019) and one entitled Dieux et hommes à Ostie, port de Rome (Paris 2020). Together with Y. Berthelet (ULiège), she is at present leading a project on the networks of the Roman gods.