University of Heidelberg (Germany)

Faculty Member, Ägyptologisches Institut

Academic Assistant

Egyptology

About

Current update:
The work on the "Charakteres" has become too comprehensive for a PhD. So the new working title is: The term "Charakteres" within greek, demotic and coptic magical contexts - appearance, usage, and distribution between the 1st and 7th century B.C.

The PhD is settled at the Universsity of Erfurt with Kai Brodersen as my supervisor and J. F. Quack as second supervisor. This project is integrated in the collaborative research centre SFB 933 “Material Text Cultures. Materiality and Presence of Writing in Non-Typographic Societies” at the University of Heidelberg.

Basic project: The "Charakteres"
My research is based on the development of a catalogue and a statistical analysis of the "Charakteres", magic signs appearing from the 1st century AD onwards throughout the Roman Empire on objects related to magical practices. After finishing the "corpus" approximately around March 2012, the actual work will focus on ancient iconographic communication patterns used in magical contexts.

So far I´ve included the signs appearing in greek and demotic papyri (coptic papyri will follow soon), on lamellae, gemstones, ostraka and from the so-called Pergamon kit. The idea developed out of my work with curse tablets from the north-western roman provinces and a database I created to gather all the information collected during the research.


There is a Blog about the charakteres-project and all the projects related to it: http://charakteres.com/

I received my Magister Artium at the University of Mainz (Germany) in pre- and early history, egyptology and classical archaeology. My M.A. thesis was about a depot of decorated terra sigillata pots from Pompeji (the so-called Atkinson chest). The focus was on a statistical analysis of decoration patterns and possible connections to specific potters ("Ein Depotfund reliefverzierter südgallischer Terra Sigillata-Schüsseln aus Pompeji", in: Jahrbuch des Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseums Mainz 51 Jahrg., Teil 2 (2004)).

I´m especially interested in exchanging experiences, knowledge and ideas concerning my research topics. I´m also very interested in exchanging experiences in statistical analysis and visualisation of information.

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