Speakers

Luisina Abrach, Universidad de Buenos Aires
The Murderous Dance around Dionysos on the Throne
Luisina Abrach is a Postdoctoral Student at University of Buenos Aires with a Conicet Grant (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas), for her Project "Traducción y comentario del Palimpsesto Sin. ar. NF 66, y su relación con las Rapsodias, los Himnos órficos y la tradición órfica". Her doctoral dissertation was "Hacia una hermenéutica integral de los Himnos órficos: traducción y examen de los antecedentes literarios, papirológicos y epigráficos, y su relevancia para el fenómeno del orfismo". She has been awarded with two Fulbright Grants to develop research stays at Bryn Mawr College (2018/ 2024). She works at the Department of Classical Literature at Universidad de Buenos Aires (Argentina) and at Universidad del Comahue (Neuquén- Argentina). Currently, she focuses her attention on the narrative, cultic and mythological aspects of the Hexameters transmitted in the Palimpsest Sinai ar. NF 66.
Alberto Bernabé, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
The Sinai Palimpsest: Problems of Interpretation
Alberto Bernabé is Emeritus Professor of Greek Philology at the Complutense University of Madrid. He has directed several research projects on Greek religion, especially Orphism and the cult of Dionysus. He has given courses and conferences in European and American institutions and is the author of more than 400 publications including articles and books on Greek linguistics, literature, religion and philosophy. Books include Poetae epici Graeci, testimonia et fragmenta (Leipzig 1987 21996 ) and Orphicorum et Orphicis similium testimonia et fragmenta (3 vols. München-Leipzig-Berlin-New York 2004-2007), and, in collaboration with A. Jiménez San Cristóbal, Instructions for the Netherworld, The Orphic Gold Tablets, Leiden-New York 2008. He has coordinated with F. Casadesús the book Orfeo y la tradición órfica: un reencuentro, Madrid 2008, and with other editors, Redefining Dionysos, Berlin 2013, and Dioniso y lo dionisíaco en la literatura griega arcaica y clásica, Madrid (forthcoming).
Giambattista D'Alessio, Università di Napoli Federico II
The Sinai Hexameter Palimpsest: a Revised Text and Interpretative Issues
Giovan Battista D'Alessio, after his formation at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, spent 3 years as the first Arnaldo Momigliano Research Fellow at University College, London. He was subsequently Lecturer and Associate Professor of Greek Literature at the University of Messina (up to 2007) and Professor of Greek Language and Literature at King's College, London (2007-2014). He is now Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Naples "Federico II". During these periods he has regularly and intensively taught on various Classics- related subjects and supervised several undergraduate and postgraduate students. His research interests have focused mainly on Greek poetry, with particular attention to Greek Lyric and Hellenistic poetry and on Greek Literary papyri, and he has published extensively on these topics.
Radcliffe Edmonds, Bryn Mawr College
They Might Be Giants: The Attendants of Dionysos
Radcliffe G. Edmonds III is the Paul Shorey Professor of Greek in the Department of Greek, Latin, & Classical Studies at Bryn Mawr College. He has published Myths of the Underworld Journey: Plato, Aristophanes, and the ‘Orphic’ Gold Tablets (Cambridge 2004) and Redefining Ancient Orphism: A Study in Greek Religion (Cambridge 2013). He has also edited The ‘Orphic’ Gold Tablets and Greek Religion (Cambridge 2011), Plato and the Power of Images (Brill 2017), and Magic and Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World (Routledge). His study of the category of magic, entitled Drawing Down the Moon: Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World, was published in 2019 by Princeton University Press. His next research project is tentatively entitled The Paths of the Dead: Imagining Death and Afterlife in Ancient Greece.
Fritz Graf, the Ohio State University
A mass of Orphic poems
Fritz Graf taught Classics at several universities in Europe and the US, including Zürich University, Basel University, Princeton University, and he is now Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of The Ohio State University. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His research concerns mainly Religion and Epigraphy; he has published on Greek Mythology, Magic in the Greco-Roman World, and Roman Festivals in the Greek East. Together with Sarah Iles Johnston, he published a commented edition of the Bacchic Gold Tablets (2nd ed 2012). His current project is a history of Greek religion for Yale University Press.
Miguel Herrero, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Mythographic theology: The accomplishment of Zeus’ will in the new Orphic fragments
Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui is Professor of Ancient Greek Language and Literature at Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He is particularly interested in intersections between Greek religion and literature, and in the reception of Greek culture in early Christianity. He has written on Homer, Empedocles, the gold tablets, Orphic poems, and Christian apologists, especially Clement of Alexandria’s Protrepticus. He is co-editor of the collective volumes Tracing Orpheus (2011), Redefining Dionysos (2013), and Les dieux d’Homère II. Anthropomorphismes (2019); and author, among other works, of Orphism and Christianity in Late Antiquity (2010), [Focílides de Mileto]. Sentencias (2018), and Catábasis: el descenso infernal en la antigüedad (2023).
Daniel Malamis, Rhodes University, South Africa
Formulae and resonance: the Orphic Hymns' engagement with the Sinai Palimpsest
Daniel Malamis grew up in the United Kingdom and Zimbabwe. He is currently Lecturer and the Head of Classical Studies at Rhodes University, Makhanda (Grahamstown), in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, where he teaches Latin, Greek and Ancient Studies at all levels. His research interests include the Orphic Hymns, the subject of his doctoral dissertation (Rhodes 2022), Orphic poetry and myth, early Greek lyric and epic poetry, and Presocratic philosophy. He lives in a quiet valley with his family and a number of animals, tame and not so tame, in the hills between Makhanda and the sea.
Dwayne Meisner, University of Regina, Saskatchewan
Rhapsodic Connections in the Sinai Palimpsest
Dwayne Meisner earned his PhD at the University of Western Ontario in 2015, and since then he has been an instructor at Campion College, University of Regina. He is a specialist in ritual, whose research interests turned to Dionysus out of a desire to understand the mystical experiences of people who undergo initiation rituals. His first book, Orphic Tradition and the Birth of the Gods (OUP: 2018), is an abridged version of his dissertation, which concentrates on the Orphic literary tradition and specifically theogonic narratives, including the Orphic Rhapsodies. Since then, he has been working on a translation and commentary of the Orphic Hymns, Lithica, and Argonautica.
Anne-France Morand, Université Laval, Québec
Sound, meaning, and motion in Palimpsest sin. ar. nf. 66 and in the Orphic Hymns
Anne-France Morand teaches as a full professor of Greek language and literature at Université Laval, in Quebec City. She studied classical philology in Geneva, Oxford, and Rome. She has taught Greek in Geneva, at the University of Victoria (BC) and Lille 3. She was a visiting scholar at the Swiss school in Rome, at the British school in Rome, and Wolson College (Oxford). She currently holds a Gutenberg chair in Alsace. She is preparing an edition, translation, and commentary of the Orphic Hymns. Her research interests also include Greek medicine, particularly Galen, Imperial literature, and ancient documents. Her recent articles include: “Galien et la paideia”, in A.-M. Favreau, S. Lalanne and J.-L. Vix (ed.), Passeurs de culture. Études sur la transmission de la culture grecque dans le monde romain des Ier - IV siècles après J.-C., Turnhout, 2022, pp. 337-345, “Les mystères dans les Hymnes orphiques : continuité ou rupture?”, in N. Belayche, Ph. Hoffmann and F. Massa (ed.), Les mystères au IIe s. de notre ère : Un tournant, Turnhout, 2021, pp. 299-315. She is currently finishing a book on Pseudepigraphy.
Carman Romano, Bryn Mawr College
Un/successful Divine Revolt in Early Greek Epic and fr. 6v-6r.
Carman Romano is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bryn Mawr College in the Greek, Latin, & Classical Studies department. She earned her doctorate from The Ohio State University in 2021 with a graduate interdisciplinary specialization in religions of the ancient Mediterranean. Her recent and in-progress work deals with the ways in which Greek poets led their audiences to conceptualize and interact with the supernatural entities that populate their performances. She is co-editing a volume on Navigating Myth, Ritual, and Belief: Essays in Honor of Sarah Iles Johnston, and her monograph Fear and the Divine-Human Relationship in Early Greek Epic is forthcoming from Routledge.
Giulia Rossetto, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften
Discussant
Giulia Rossetto is Assistant Professor at the University of Vienna, Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies and researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her research focuses on the codicology and palaeography of Byzantine manuscripts, with a special interest on palimpsests. She has participated in the Sinai Palimpsests Project of EMEL (directors: Michael Phelps and Claudia Rapp). During the project 74 palimpsests preserved at the Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai were photographed with multispectral imaging, studied by a team of scholars and made freely available online. Among the numerous textual discoveries should be counted the fragmentary Greek hexameters dealing with the childhood of Dionysus in manuscript Sin. ar. NF 66 that are the focus of this conference, which were first identified and published by Rossetto.
Marco Antonio Santamaria, Universidad de Salamanca
Are the poetic fragments of the Sinai palimpsest Orphic?
Marco Antonio Santamaría is Associate Professor of Greek at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He is the author of several articles and book chapters on Orphic texts, Greek cosmogonies and afterlife conceptions. He has co-edited Tracing Orpheus: Studies on Orphic Fragments, De Gruyter (2011) and edited The Derveni Papyrus: Unearthing Ancient Mysteries, Brill (2019).