Notes on Contributors
Federico Alpi obtained a doctorate in Armenian Studies at the University of Pisa in 2015 under the supervision of Alessandro Orengo. Between 2016 and 2018 he was a Research Fellow at the University of Bologna, where he had previously graduated after following the courses of Gabriella Uluhogian and Anna Sirinian. Before and after his doctorate, he spent several terms at the University of Oxford under the mentorship of Theo Maarten van Lint. He is now an affiliated researcher at the Fondazione per le scienze religiose, Bologna. His research interests focus on the Armenian civilisation and its contacts with surrounding cultures between the 7th and 14th centuries.
Tara Andrews is Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Vienna and obtained her DPhil in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford under the supervision of Theo Maarten van Lint. She is the principal investigator in the ERC Consolidator project Re-evaluating the Eleventh Century through Linked Events and Entities. She is the Secretary and a member of the steering committee of the Association Internationale des Études Arméniennes.
Emilio Bonfiglio is a Research Fellow at the University of Hamburg, where he focuses on Armenian manuscript culture and philology. Bonfiglio earned his DPhil in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford in 2011 and has held research fellowships at the Universities of Tübingen and Vienna, Dumbarton Oaks/Harvard University, two Calouste Gulbenkian Fellowships at the Universities of Geneva and Boğaziçi, and a British Academy postdoctoral fellowship at Oxford. His research focuses on philology, cultural history, and the history of Christianity of the Armenian, Syriac, Greek, and Latin communities of the late antique and early mediaeval periods. He is a member of the steering committee of the Association Internationale des Études Arméniennes.
Phil Booth is the A.G. Leventis Associate Professor in Eastern Christianity at the University of Oxford, the Director of the Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity, and a Research Fellow at St Peter’s College. His work focuses on ecclesiastical history, in particular the history of eastern Christianities in the eastern Roman Empire, the Sasanian Empire, and the caliphate in the 4th to 10th centuries.
Sebastian Brock was, from 1974 until his retirement in 2003, Reader in Aramaic and Syriac at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wolfson College. His standing as one of the foremost authorities in his field has been recognized multiply: he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1977 and awarded the Leverhulme Medal in 2009.
Valentina Calzolari is Professor of Armenian Studies at the University of Geneva, a corresponding member of the Institut de France (Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres), and the President of the Association Internationale des Études Arméniennes. Her research interests include the Alexandrian School of Neoplatonism and its reception in Armenia and the wider Middle East, apocryphal literature, post-genocide literature, and women’s writings. In 2021 she held a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship at the University of Oxford. Her latest books are The Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles in Armenian (Brill, 2022) and Les arts libéraux et les sciences dans l’Arménie ancienne et médiévale (collective volume, Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2022).
S. Peter Cowe is Narekatsi Professor of Armenian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include Late Antique and mediaeval Armenian intellectual history, the Armenian kingdom and state formation across the mediaeval Mediterranean, Muslim-Christian dialogue, and modern Armenian nationalism. The author of five books in the field and editor of ten, he is the past co-editor of the Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies. He has served on the executive board of the Society for Armenian Studies and the Association Internationale des Études Arméniennes. A recipient of the Garbis Papazian Award for Armenology, he has been inducted into the Accademia Ambrosiana, Milan, and awarded a doctorate honoris causa by the Russian-Armenian University of Armenia.
Charles de Lamberterie was, from 1996 until his retirement in 2013, professor of the History of Greek at the Université Paris-Sorbonne and remains one of the editors of the Revue des Études Arméniennes. Next to his work on Greek, he is a specialist in Armenian and Indo-European historical linguistics. In recognition of his outstanding work, he was elected a member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres in 2010.
Armenuhi Drost-Abgarjan is Professor of Armenian Studies at Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg and Director of the MESROP Centre of Armenian Studies. A former committee member of the Association Internationale des Études Arméniennes, her research focuses on Armenian literature and philology in the context of Byzantine Studies and Oriental Christianity.
Nazenie Garibian is a Senior researcher at the Matenadaran Institute of Ancient Manuscripts (Yerevan) and Professor at the State Academy of Fine Arts of Armenia, as well as a member of the steering committee of the Association Internationale des Études Arméniennes. She obtained her PhD in Art History at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. Her research interests include the history, art, and architecture of the Caucasus in the early Christian and early mediaeval periods in relation with the Byzantine and Iranian cultural environments.
Gohar Grigoryan Savary is currently a postdoctoral researcher funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation at the Department of Art History of the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. She obtained her PhD from the same university in 2017 with a dissertation called Royal Images of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia (1198–1375). She previously worked at the Matenadaran Institute of Ancient Manuscripts (Yerevan) in the Departments of Codicology and Art History and was a research fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.
Sergio La Porta is the Haig and Isabel Berberian Professor of Armenian Studies and the Interim Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at California State University, Fresno. He received his PhD in Armenian and Near Eastern Studies from Harvard University in 2001. Prior to coming to Fresno, La Porta taught Armenian and Religious Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests include mediaeval Armenian intellectual and social history, philology, and apocalyptic literature.
Alex MacFarlane defended a doctoral thesis on the Armenian Alexander Romance in 2020, supervised by Theo Maarten van Lint at the University of Oxford, and has subsequently held a Manoogian Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Michigan. Their research focuses on literary connections between the Alexander Romance, the History of the City of Brass, and other texts across the Caucasus, primarily in Armenian and Georgian.
Christina Maranci is Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies in the Departments of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. She has published widely on Armenian art and architecture, including The Art of Armenia: An Introduction (Oxford UP, 2018). Her recent work has focused on the Bagratid monuments of Ani. She is also an advocate for Armenian cultural heritage in conflict and post conflict zones.
Thomas F. Mathews is the John Langeloth Loeb Professor of the History of Art, Emeritus, at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Having devoted his career to interpreting the religious content of Early Christian and mediaeval art and after years of research and writing on the issue of the origins of Christian painting, he published The Dawn of Christian Art in Panel Paintings and Icons (J. Paul Getty, 2016). Author of several books and other publications, including The Clash of Gods: A Re-Interpretation of Early Christian Art (Princeton University Press, 1993), he has been very active in retirement in Paris and Oxford, where he held a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship.
Robin Meyer finished his doctorate on the Iranian influence on classical Armenian syntax in 2017, under the supervision of Theo Maarten van Lint. After three years as the Diebold Research Associate in Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford, he is now Assistant Professor in Historical Linguistics at the Université de Lausanne. His research focuses on historical syntax and language contact in Armenian, Iranian, and other languages of antiquity. He is co-author and co-editor of Armenia: Masterpieces from an Enduring Culture (Bodleian Library, 2015) and a member of the steering committee of the Association Internationale des Études Arméniennes.
Alessandro Orengo is Associate Professor in Armenian Studies at the University of Pisa. His research interests include 5th- to 7th-century Armenian linguistics and literature, the old Armenian grammatical tradition (5th–18th c.), and the history of Armenian printed books. He is currently editing with Irene Tinti the forthcoming Brill volume on Armenian linguistics in the series Handbooks of Oriental Studies.
James Russell is Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies, Emeritus, at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. He has published widely on matters literary, linguistic, and religious concerning the ancient Middle East, with a particular focus on the relationship between Zoroastrianism and Armenia.
Anahit Safaryan is a PhD student at the University of Vienna under the supervision of Professor Tara Andrews. Her doctoral work focuses on the relations between historiographical discourse and the emergence and development of the liberation movements of the Armenians in the 17th–18th centuries. Safaryan completed her BA and MA in history at Yerevan State University, Armenia. She began her doctoral studies at the University of Bern and then moved to the University of Vienna in 2017, together with the SNSF-funded project in which she was involved at the time. She has continued her work in Vienna following the end of the project.
Anna Sirinian is Associate Professor in Armenian Studies at the Alma Mater Studiorum—Università di Bologna. Her research and teaching focus on ancient and mediaeval Armenian literature, Armenian manuscripts, and documents regarding the historical presence of Armenians in Italy. She devotes her attention particularly to the study of Armenian colophons in their historical and literary significance.
Michael Stone was, from 1980 until his retirement in 2007, Professor of Armenian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests are far-reaching and include, among others, the translation of Jewish literature into Armenian, Armenian deuterocanonical literature and Armenian palaeography. Next to numerous visiting professorships at Harvard, Yale, and Leiden, Professor Stone is a founding member of the Association Internationale des Études Arméniennes, which he served as president until 2000.
Irene Tinti is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Civilisations and Forms of Knowledge, University of Pisa, and holds a PhD in Linguistics (with focus on Ancient Greek and Armenian) from the same university. She has held research positions in Budapest, Oxford, Geneva, and Cambridge. She is the Treasurer and a member of the steering committee of the Association Internationale des Études Arméniennes and the co-editor of the forthcoming volume on Armenian linguistics in the Brill series Handbooks of Oriental Studies. She has authored “Essere” e “divenire” nel Timeo greco e armeno (PUP, 2012) and several other contributions on the Armenian Platonic translations and other Greek and Armenian texts.
Edda Vardanyan obtained her PhD in Art History in 2001 from the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. She is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Ancient Manuscripts—Matenadaran and an associated scholar at the Centre d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance (UMR 8167, Orient et Méditerranée, CNRS/University of Paris 1 & 4, EPHE, Paris). Her main research interests include Armenian culture, mediaeval Armenian art and architecture, Armenian manuscripts, and manuscript illumination. She is the author of numerous publications on mediaeval Armenian art and architecture.
David Zakarian is an Associate of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford. He wrote his doctoral dissertation at Oxford under the supervision of Theo Maarten van Lint and published it as a monograph with the title Women, Too, Were Blessed: The Portrayal of Women in Early Christian Armenian Texts (Brill, 2021). Between 2017 and 2019 he held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Oxford, working on the project Writing History from Below: Christian-Muslim Interactions in Armenian Colophons during the Long Fifteenth Century (1375–1501).