Stavroula Constantinou
Project Coordinator
Director of the Centre for Medieval Arts & Rituals (CeMAR),
Associate Professor in Byzantine Studies
Dept. of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies,
University of Cyprus
Stavroula Constantinou is the founder and director of the Centre for Medieval Arts & Rituals (CeMAR). She is an Associate Professor in Byzantine Studies at the UCY and member of the European Cultural Parliament. She studied at the University of Cyprus (1992-1996), the Free University of Berlin (1997-1999, 2000-2003), and the University of Cambridge (1999-2000). During 2010-2011 she was a Humboldt fellow at the Free University of Berlin. Currently she coordinates three major research projects: the European twinning project Network for Medieval Arts and Rituals (https://netmar.cy) and two projects funded through the Cyprus Foundation of Research and Innovation, Lactating Breasts: Motherhood and Breastfeeding in Antiquity and Byzantium and Storyworlds in Collections: Toward a Theory of the Ancient and Byzantine Tale. Her research focuses on Byzantine Greek narratives (mainly hagiography and romance), gender, ritual, performance, and emotions. Concerning gender in particular, she has published on the following: gendered emotions, female and male sainthood, Byzantine ideologies concerning women, literary portraits of women, and the female body.
Aspasia Skouroumouni Stavrinou
Early Stage Researcher
Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Medieval Arts & Rituals (CeMAR) of the University of Cyprus,
Dept. of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, University of Cyprus
Aspasia Skouroumouni Stavrinou is a Postdoctoral Reseacher at the Centre for Medieval Arts & Rituals of the University of Cyprus, currently working on the MotherBreast Project. She studied Classics at the National Kapodistrian University of Athens (BA Hons. in Greek Philology, Distinction). She continued her studies at the University College London, where she obtained an MA in Classics (Distinction) and a PhD in Classics (Thesis’ title: Staging the Female: Studies in Female Space in Euripides). During the above studies, she has received scholarships from the Hellenic Scholarship Foundation, the Cyprus Scholarship Foundation and the Onassis Foundation. She has taught various subjects related to the ancient Greek language, literature and civilization at universities of the UK (UCL, Kings College) and Cyprus (University of Cyprus, Open University of Cyprus). She has also acted as academic advisor for modern productions of ancient Greek drama (London Bloomsbury Theatre Productions). Her research interests focus on ancient Greek literature and particularly ancient Greek drama (with emphasis on issues of performance technique, stagecraft, space, gender, modern reception), ancient Greek religion and ritual, and on the culture of motherhood and breastfeeding from antiquity to early Byzantium. She has published relevant studies in international journals and collective volumes.
Maria Parani
Research Collaborator
Associate Professor in Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Art and Archaeology
Dept. of History and Archaeology,
University of Cyprus
Maria G. Parani studied History and Archaeology at the University of Athens (1991). She then went on to obtain an M.A. in Field and Analytical Techniques in Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London (1993) and a D.Phil. in Byzantine Art and Archaeology at the University of Oxford (2000). She teaches Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Art and Archaeology at the Department of History and Archaeology of the University of Cyprus since 2005. Her training as a field archaeologist and as an art-historian shaped her approach to the study of medieval Byzantium and her interest in the ways meaning was conveyed in art or secular and religious ritual through material things, whether actual or depicted. Given the communicative power of dress, especially, as a means of constructing and communicating identity, Byzantine attire has been a central focus of her research. This preoccupation with dress, which is hardly ever attested archaeologically, has led her to develop the second main research axis that defines her scholarly profile, namely the exploration of alternative sources for the study of Byzantine material culture, both written and visual. In addition to this, a significant part of her research in recent years has concentrated on the art and archaeology of Byzantine and Early Medieval Cyprus, from the fourth down to the fourteenth century.
Elizabeth Bolman
Research Collaborator
Elsie B. Smith Professor in the Liberal Arts
Dept. of Art History and Art, College of Arts and Sciences,
Case Western Reserve University
Elizabeth S. Bolman engages with the visual culture of the eastern Mediterranean in the late antique and Byzantine periods. She is best known for her work in Egypt, in which she has demonstrated the vitality of Christian Egyptian art and presented new understandings of the nature of artistic production in the early Byzantine and Medieval periods. She edited and was the principal contributor to the award-winning Monastic Visions: Wall Paintings in the Monastery of St. Antony at the Red Sea (Yale University Press and the American Research Center in Egypt, 2002) and to The Red Monastery Church: Beauty and Asceticism in Upper Egypt (Yale University Press and the American Research Center in Egypt, 2016). This most recent book is the product of a decade-long multidisciplinary project that she initiated and directed, which included the cleaning and conservation of the Red Monastery’s spectacular paintings. The conserved church has received a considerable amount of international attention; among other subjects, it includes a monumental secco painting of the Nursing Mother of God. Currently, she is completing a gender studies analysis of depictions of the Byzantine Galaktotrophousa (nursing Virgin Mary), and is preparing the Rostovtzeff Lectures which she gave at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, for publication. She was appointed Elsie B. Smith Professor in the Liberal Arts and Chair of the Department of Art History, Art and Art Education at Case Western Reserve University in August 2017, charged with building the Keithley Institute for Art History in collaboration with the Cleveland Museum of Art, and leading the Joint Program between CWRU and the Cleveland Museum of Art. At Temple University Bolman received the Lindback Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Great Teacher Award, and the College Art Association has recognized her expertise with its Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Preservation She is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, Fulbright program, National Endowment for the Humanities, Dumbarton Oaks, the American Research Center in Egypt, and the United States Agency for International Development, among others.
Laurence Totelin
Research Collaborator
Senior Lecturer in Ancient History
School of History, Archaeology and Religion,
Cardiff University
Laurence Totelin is a Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at Cardiff University, with a research interest in the history of Greek and Roman science, technology and medicine. Her research focusses on the history of ancient botany, pharmacology and gynaecology. She is the author of numerous articles and two books: Hippocratic Recipes: Oral and Written Transmission of Pharmacological Knowledge in Fifth- and fourth-Century Greece (Brill, 2009); and with Gavin Hardy, Ancient Botany (Routledge, 2016). Her current research deals with bodily fluids and the fluidity of the body in ancient medicine and religion. Of all bodily fluids, it is milk, in all its ambivalence, that fascinates her the most. Her academic work on milk goes beyond the ancient world, and she has also recently taken part in an inter-disciplinary project on the history of infant feeding in modern Wales.
Petros Bouras-Vallianatos
Research Collaborator
Wellcome Lecturer in History of Medicine,
School of History, Classics and Archaeology,
University of Edinburgh
Petros Bouras-Vallianatos is Wellcome Lecturer in History of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. He studied pharmacy, ancient, and Byzantine history, before obtaining his PhD in 2015 from King’s College London. He is a specialist in the history of medicine and pharmacology in the medieval Mediterranean, with a particular focus on Byzantium and on the cultural exchanges between the Christian and Islamic worlds. He has published extensively on medieval medicine and pharmacology, offering editions of previously unpublished texts; the reception of the classical medical tradition in the Middle Ages; and Greek palaeography, including the first descriptive catalogue of the Greek manuscripts at the Wellcome Library. His first monograph, Innovation in Byzantine Medicine: The Writings of John Zacharias Aktouarios (c. 1275-c. 1330) (Oxford University Press, 2020), highlights the late Byzantine innovative contributions to the fields of physiology, diagnosis, and therapeutics. His forthcoming Routledge monograph provides the editio princeps and an English translation of four significant, previously unpublished, medieval Greek recipe books dated to between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. He has also produced three edited volumes, including Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Galen, which constitutes the first reference work on this important but neglected subject. He is currently working on a five-year Wellcome funded project “Making and Consuming Drugs in the Italian and Byzantine Worlds (12th-15th c.)”.
Niki Tsironis
Research Collaborator
Associate in Byzantine Studies at the Centre for Hellenic Studies of Harvard University, Washington D.C.,
Adjunct Professor of Byzantine Studies at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies,
Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, CA
Dionysios Stathakopoulos
Research Collaborator
Assistant Professor in Byzantine Studies
Dept. of History and Archaeology, University of Cyprus
Dionysios Stathakopoulos is Assistant Professor in Byzantine Studies at the University of Cyprus. He has served as a Senior Lecturer at King’s College London. He has also taught at the University of Vienna and the Central European University in Budapest. His doctorate thesis on ‘Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire’ was published by Ashgate in 2004. He has published widely on disease, subsistence crises, the history of medicine, hospitals and physicians, charity, poverty and remembrance. His latest book is ᾽A Short History of the Byzantine Empire᾽ (London, 2014). He is currently working on two monographs on wealth, consumption and inequality in the late Byzantine world.
Giulia Pedrucci
Research Collaborator
Adjunct Professor for Religious Studies
University of Verona
Giulia Pedrucci is an adjunct professor for Religious Studies at the University of Verona, and she is currently a Gerda Henkel post-doctoral scholar. She was Marie Skłodowska Curie Cofund Fellow at the Max-Weber-Kolleg für kultur- und sozialwissenschaftliche Studien at the University of Erfurt (Germany). Her PhD dissertation was about breastfeeding in the Greek and Roman worlds. She has been working on the epistemological key-tenets of a subfield of gender studies at the intersection between Motherhood Studies and Religious Studies. On this topic, she has published a monograph (L’allattamento nella Grecia di epoca arcaica e classica, 2013), edited two collected volumes (Maternità e monoteismi/Motherhood(s) and Monotheisms, 2019; Breastfeeding(s) and Religions: Normative Prescriptions and Individual Appropriation of Them. A cross-cultural and Interdisciplinary Perspective from Antiquity to the Present, 2019) and a Special Issue of Open Theology. (Motherhood(s) Religions: The Religionification of Motherhood and Mothers’ Appropriation of Religion, 2020). The last three publications resulted from the organisation of a cycle of three International Workshops.
Mati Meyer
Research Collaborator
Associate Professor in Art History
Dept. of Literature, Language and Arts, Open University of Israel
Mati Meyer is an Associate Professor in Art History at the Open University of Israel (Dept. of Literature, Language and Arts). She studied at the Université de Paris I, Sorbonne (1989-90), and continued her studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where she obtained a PhD in Art History (2002). She has published many articles on Byzantine illuminated manuscripts, and a book, An Obscure Portrait: Imaging Women's Reality in Byzantine Art (London: Pindar Press, 2009). With Katrin Kogman-Appel, she edited Between Judaism and Christianity: Art Historical Essays in Honor of Elisheva (Elisabeth) Revel-Neher (Leiden: Brill, 2009). A collected volume on emotions and gender in Byzantine culture was co-edited with Stavroula Constantinou (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2019). She is currently editing with Charis Messis a Handbook of Gender in Byzantium, (Abington, UK: Routledge), and she is writing a monograph dealing with representations of the gendered female body in Byzantine illuminated books.
Mark Schiefsky
Advisory Board
Professor in Classics
Dept. of the Classics, Harvard University
Mark Schiefsky is a Professor of Classics at the Harvard University Department of Classics. Schiefsky is a historian of philosophy and science in the ancient world. Most of his work is concerned with the ways in which philosophy interacted with science in Graeco-Roman antiquity: how philosophical theories shaped and were shaped by scientific inquiry in various domains, including medicine, mechanics, mathematics, and astronomy. He has been also working on the reception of ancient Greek philosophy and science, particularly in the Byzantine and Arabic worlds. Schiefsky has been the principal investigator of two major digital humanities projects: The Archimedes Project: Realizing the Vision of an Open Digital Research Library for the History of Mechanics and A Digital Corpus for Graeco-Arabic Studies.
John Duffy
Advisory Board
Emeritus Professor in Byzantine Philology and Literature,
Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University
John Duffy is an Emeritus Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine Philology and Literature (Harvard University, 2013-). The main focus of his research has been on Byzantine literature in the areas of theology, philosophy, medicine, and religious tales. One of his specialties is the preparation of text editions, a type of research he believes to be of fundamental importance for Medieval Greek, which, in the matter of reliable texts, lags far behind not only Classics but Medieval Latin as well. Duffy has been a Junior Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks (1971-73) and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin (1984; 1987); he is a member of the following: the Kommission für das Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae, the board of Senior Fellows in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, and the U.S. National Committee for Byzantine Studies. Since 2005, he has been editor of the Washington series of the Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae. In 1999, he was the recipient of the Paideia Award from the Greek Archdiocese of America.
Monica Michaelidou
Pediatric Society of Cyprus Representative
Pediatrician, Lactation Consultant
Member of the Pediatric Society of Cyprus
Dr Monica Michaelidou is a pediatrician working full time in private practice, and since 2005 as a primary care pediatrician. In 2011 she was certified as a lactation consultant. She has been giving outreach lectures on all subjects relating to child health and child care. She has also been lecturing and promoting breastfeeding to pregnant and lactating mothers. She offers support to lactating mothers privately and in group meetings. She is actively interested in child nutrition.
Ourania Kolokotroni
Cyprus Breastfeeding Association Representative
Pediatrician, Lactation Consultant
Chair of the Department of Primary Care and Population Health and
Clinical Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health,
University of Nicosia Medical School
President of the Cyprus Breastfeeding Association “Gift for Life”
Dr Ourania Kolokotroni is a pediatrician with a PhD in Epidemiology. She is currently the Chair of the department of Primary Care and Population Health and Course Director of the Masters in Family Medicine programme at the University of Nicosia Medical School. She is also a certified lactation consultant and the President of the Cyprus Breastfeeding association “Gift for Life”. Dr Kolokotroni has been the Research Coordinator of the Pediatric Respiratory Research Unit at the Cyprus International Institute for the Environment and Public Health for 7 years and worked within a team that laid foundations for epidemiological research in Cyprus. She was involved in the organization and conduction of large population studies, funded through competitive grant applications whilst her work involved the organization, supervision of data collection, data analysis and write up of scientific publications and project reports to funders. She has worked on a number of studies that have investigated the association of obesity with the development of chronic diseases such as asthma which involved the assessment of dietary, anthropometric indices, metabolic markers and physical activity levels in children. One of the studies she was involved, investigated the link between adiposity indicators including metabolic and hormonal markers with asthma prevalence in adolescents in Cyprus and provided evidence to suggest that low concentration of high density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol is associated with adolescent asthma. This novel finding in the international literature was published in the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Allergy and was discussed in the journal’s editorial. Furthermore, Dr Kolokotroni’s presentation of the study results at the International Congress on Pediatric Pulmonology in June 2011 won her the Young Researcher Award. In addition, her PhD study was on the prevalence of Hypovitaminosis D, its determinants and association with chronic illnesses such as asthma. This study provided evidence of a U shape association between vitamin D and two measures of adiposity, BMI and body fat%, another novel finding in the international literature. Finally, Dr Kolokotroni participated in the BrEaST Start in Life project as the Researcher Liaison between the Cyprus Breastfeeding Organization and the research team of the Cyprus University of Technology and is currently providing expert advice to the Erasmus project Baby Buddy Forward.
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