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GUNHYUK LEE Country: South Korea Gunhyuk Lee focuses on Late Antique Egypt between the 4th and 8th centuries—a period marked by the rapid growth and institutionalization of churches and monasteries. His doctoral research explores how donations to Christian institutions gradually came to be framed through the lens of charity and explicitly associated with the salvation of the soul. Drawing on a range of evidence—including Greek and Coptic hagiographies, inscriptions, prayers, and documentary sources such as papyri and ostraca (wills, private letters, and delivery orders)—he reconstructs the evolving nexus between donations, charity, and the economy of salvation in Late Antique Egyptian society. Email: lee_gunhyuk@phd.ceu.edu |
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THERES JOIS PATTERY Department of Historical Studies, 2025 |
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ARASH KHORASHADI PhD Enrollment: CEU Department of Historical Studies, 2024 Arash Khorashadi received an interdisciplinary training in the Sciences and the Humanities, earning degrees in Physics and Mathematics from NODET Nīshāpūr, a BSc in Architecture from Shiraz University, and an MA in Philosophy from CEU, where he explored the intersection of language, faith, and reason in the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein. His PhD project studies the intellectual environment of twelfth-century Khorāsān with a focus on the pharmacist and Sufi poet Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār, who died probably in 1219 during the Mongol massacre of Nīshāpūr. With his knowledge in the religious and non-religious sciences, ʿAṭṭār exemplifies the subtle engagement of the Sufi “Religion of Love” with post-Classical Philosophy, that is, the scholastic reception of Avicenna and al-Ghazālī. In light of ʿAṭṭār’s work, the PhD thesis will argue that philosophical rationality did not fade from the eastern Islamicate World in the aftermath of al-Ghazālī’s criticism of Avicenna’s Neoplatonized Aristotelianism. Rather, new forms of rational (or rationalizable) thinking, both scholastic and poetic, emerged during this period and had an immense effect on the intellectual culture of the subsequent centuries in the Turko-Persianate world. |
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GULRANO ATAEVA Country: Kyrgyzstan Gulrano Ataeva is an MA graduate of the CEU History Department and presently a doctoral student researching the history of modern Central Asia. Her PhD dissertation examines the ways Kyrgyz women’s subjectivities unfolded within the Soviet project of moral and social transformations. Her study focuses on tracing how Islamic traditions, pre-Islamic spiritual cosmologies, and communist moral frameworks intersected in shaping forms of knowledge and selfhood. She explores how these moral worlds were lived, contested, and reworked by women in the context of industrial policies, material conditions, family expectations, and cultural and religious practices, complicating the state narrative of emancipation. Examinig archival sources, vernacular writing, oral histories, and late Soviet Qur'anic literature, she explores how concepts such as komil inson or insān al-kāmil (the morally complete individual) and adam (the ideal human) became tools for reinterpreting moral authority in the discursive sphere and remaking the self under a changing political order. |
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KARSTEN J. SCHUIL Country: The Netherlands Karsten J. Schuil is a cultural historian of the late medieval and early modern periods with a specific interest in the history of emotions, church history, and socio-religious practices. He obtained a Research Master degree in Classical, Medieval, and Early Modern Studies (2020) from the University of Groningen. Karsten’s master thesis dealt with the sixteenth-century priest Jacob Vallick. It provides a unique insight into the diversity of the local social-cultural relationships and roles a priest could be involved in during the sixteenth century. Subsequently Karsten started investigating one of the pillars of late medieval society: pilgrimage. In the Fall of 2020, he obtained a scholarship at the Royal Dutch Institute in Rome (KNIR) to investigate the pilgrimage to Rome. His current PhD project studies the experiences of the Rompilgerfahrt in a broad variety of sources, including pilgrim travelogues, guides, prayers, songs, legal sources, and 'commonplace' stories. The project analyses four elements of the journey: emotions, senses, storytelling, and temporality. |
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SARANYA CHANDRAN Country: India Saranya Chandran received her BA from the University of Calicut, India, in English Literature in 2017 and her MA in 2020 from Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, India, in Malayalam Literature. Her master thesis focused on Malayalam script and Grammar in Language computing. In her thesis she enquires how to apply the grammar and syntax of Malayalam into language computing and the necessity of uniform encoding of Malayalam fonts. In 2020, she continued her studies at CEU, earning another MA in Medieval Studies, focusing on the vernacular scripts of Malayalam. In her thesis, "A comprehensive study of medieval and early modern scripts in Kerala," she studied six different Medieval and early modern scripts from Kerala. She placed Arabi-Malayalam and Garshuni Malayalam along with the other four scripts treated by popular historiography that is biased to Hindu sources of Kerala. She was the Edward Y. Hannoush Memorial Fellow at Beth Mardutho, Syriac research centre in New Jersey, From June 2022 to September 2022, Where she trained an East Syriac OCR/HTR model and FLex Malayalam. |
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OLEKSII RUDENKOCountry: Ukraine
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JUAN MANUEL RUBIO AREVALO Country: Colombia
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