About
Overview of Work
At the end of an undergraduate degree in Classics (Harvard, 2010), a chance meeting with Syriac amulets and talisman-manuals planted the idea for a dissertation focused on late ancient and medieval Greek and Latin magical texts which I completed at Berkeley. What could these sometimes obscure, often pleasingly wrought and poetic texts mean to us? How could they arm the ancients against fortune's slings and arrows? More recently I have looked at the related sphere of astrology as another form of highly transmissible popular knowledge with a grounding in religious thought. Along the way, I've worked extensively with artifacts of manuscript cultures in many media—inscriptions on stone and amuletic gems and metal leaves, papyri, parchment and paper codices. This has brought me to research positions in Oxford, Berlin, and most recently Sydney.
Listen now Byzantine Magic with Michael Zellmann-Rohrer March 23, 2021
Research Positions
Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
Institut für Wissensgeschichte des Altertums, ERC Advanced Grant ZODIAC
Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter, 2021 – 2026 (on leave, 2024 – 2025)
Macquarie University, Sydney
Department of History and Archaeology
Research Fellow in Papyrology, 2024 – 2025
University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Faculty of Classics
Associate Researcher, 2021 – 2022
Lexicon of Greek Personal Names
Researcher, 2016 – 2021
University of California, Berkeley, CA
The Center for the Tebtunis Papyri
Assistant to the Curator, 2013 – 2016
Education
University of California, Berkeley, CA
Ph.D. in Classics (and Medieval Studies, concurrent), May 2016
Dissertation entitled The Tradition of Greek and Latin Incantations and Related Ritual Texts from Antiquity through the Medieval and Early Modern Periods
M.A. in Classics (Latin emphasis), December 2011
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
A.B. in Classics (Latin and Greek), May 2010. Magna cum laude with Highest Honors in Field and Foreign Language Citation in Classical Hebrew