Papyrology & Ancient Texts

Roberta Mazza was born in Rome and obtained a PhD in papyrology at the University of Bologna. She now teaches papyrology and Graeco-Roman Egypt at the University of Manchester, and has published several articles on papyrology as well as an academic book. She co-curated an exhibition of papyri, portraits and Egyptian contemporary art at the John Rylands Library in 2012 and is honorary curator of the Graeco-Roman Egypt antiquities of the Manchester Museum. Her research has been covered by the Guardian, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal and The Times, and she has been interviewed by BBC Radio 4 on various topics. Find her Pew Literary profile at the links above or see her University of Manchester profile here.

Katherine Blouin is Associate Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Toronto. She holds a PhD in Roman History from the Université Laval (Québec City, Canada) and the Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis (Nice, France), and a Postdoctoral Diploma in Greek Papyrology from the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris, France). Her work centers on socio-economic and environmental history, with a focus on ancient, and particularly Roman, Egypt, as well as on the ethics and (de)colonial entailments of Antiquity-related fields. See her University of Toronto profile at the links above.

Usama Ali Gad is a tenured lecturer/assistant professor of papyrology and Greco-Roman Studies at Ain Shams University (Cairo, Egypt). He holds a Dr. phil. in papyrology from Heidelberg University (Germany), an MA and a BA in Classical European Civilization (i.e. Classics) from Ain Shams University and a BA in English language and literature and a B.Ed. in teaching English as a foreign language from the faculty of Education of al-Menofiya University (Egypt). He has a wide variety of interests including papyrology, Greco-Roman heritage in Egypt, the history of classical studies in Egypt, orientalism, classics and nationalism and classics and colonialism. See his Academia profile at the links above. 

Rachel Mairs is Professor of Classics at the University of Reading. She is interested in the interaction between Greeks and "non-Greeks" in the Hellenistic world, with a particular emphasis on Egypt and on Central Asia. Her PhD (Cambridge, 2006) was on ethnic identity in the "Hellenistic Far East" (Bactria-Sogdiana, Arachosia and India). She is one of the organisers of the Hellenistic Central Asia Research Network (HCARN). She also works on ancient multilingualism, especially Greek-Egyptian. She has worked on collaborative research projects dealing with papyrological and epigraphic material, such as the AHRC-funded Corpus of Ptolemaic Inscriptions. With colleagues in Egypt and Canada, she runs the blog Everyday Orientalism, which works to highlight the legacies of colonialism in papyrology and classics. See her University of Reading profile at the links above.