Korshi Dosoo (PhD, Macquarie University, 2015) is research associate at the Julius Maximilian University Würzburg. His research focuses on the history of magic and popular religion in Egypt and the larger eastern Mediterranean from Roman times into the early mediaeval period. He is co-editor of the volume Magikon Zōon: Animal and Magic from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (2022, with Jean-Charles Coulon), and of Papyri Copticae Magicae. Volume 1: Formularies (2023, with Markéta Preininger), and principal editor of the Kyprianos Database of Ancient Ritual Texts and Objects. From 2018-2023 he led the project The Coptic Magical Papyri: Vernacular Religion in Late Antique and Early Islamic Egypt. Read more

Raquel Martín Hernández is Associate Professor in the Department of Classical Philology at the Complutense University of Madrid, where she earned her PhD in 2006 with a dissertation on Orphism and Magic. Her research focuses on the edition and study of Greek magical papyri from Roman Egypt, as well as on the analysis of the images associated with magical texts. She is the author of several scholarly publications, including Orfeo y los magos. La literatura órfica, la magia y los misterios (Madrid, 2010), and editor of The Iconography of Magic. Images of Power and the Power of Images in Ancient and Late Antique Magic (Leuven/Paris/Bristol, 2022). Among her articles are “A Coherent Division of a Magical Handbook. Using Lectional Signs in PGM VII”, Segno e Testo 13, 2015 and “The Figural Representation of Victims on Agonistic Late-Antique Curse Tablets”, Religion in the Roman Empire 7.1, 2021. Read more

Ortal-Paz Saar is a cultural historian at the Department of History and Art History at Utrecht University, Netherlands. She is particularly interested in portraying the interaction between different religious traditions. Previously focusing on ancient and medieval magic and rituals, she currently researches the topic of identity through the prism of funerary inscriptions. Her publications include Jewish Love Magic: From Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages (2017); Aramaic Magic Bowls in the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin (2018, coauthored with S. Bhayro, J.N. Ford, and D. Levene); and Letters in the Dust: The Epigraphy and Archaeology of Jewish Medieval Cemeteries (2023, edited with L.V. Rutgers). She has developed the online project PEACE – Portal of Epigraphy, Archaeology, Conservation and Education on Jewish Funerary Culture. Together with K. Dosoo, P. Sarischouli, and R. Martín Hernández, she launched the initiative “Structuring Magic”, aimed at developing an interdisciplinary digital infrastructure for the study of magic. Read more

Panagiota Sarischouli is Professor of Ancient Greek and Papyrology in the Department of Classics at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She received her Ph.D. in Classics from the Freie Universität Berlin in 1994, with a dissertation on Berlin papyri, and subsequently held a research position at the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection in Berlin (1995–1998, funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation). Her scholarly work is primarily concerned with the critical edition of Greek literary, sub-literary, and documentary papyri, and—over the past decade—has broadened to encompass the intricate interplay between religion and magic in Roman Egypt. Her latest book, “Decoding the Osirian Myth: A Transcultural Reading of Plutarch’s Narrative”, offers a transcultural analysis of diverse mythological and religious traditions, exploring Plutarch’s rendition of the Osirian myth and its interconnections with both Egyptian and Greek sources. She is the Principal Investigator of the NOMINA project (funded by H.F.R.I.), a comprehensive initiative aimed at systematically cataloging and analyzing the Graeco-Egyptian voces magicae, with particular emphasis on their transcultural significance and linguistic intricacies (https://voices.uchicago.edu/magicalpapyri/news/). She is also a member of the research and editorial team of the international research project "Transmission of Magical Knowledge in Antiquity: the Papyrus Magical Handbook" (https://voices.uchicago.edu/magicalpapyri/participants/), which is under the auspices of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society; the University of Chicago. Read more