CSMC Newsletter

The German Research Foundation (DFG) awards over €3 million for the ‘Papyrus Provenance Project’ to be led by the internationally renowned researcher Brent Nongbri, who will join the University of Hamburg and the UWA Cluster of Excellence next year. Nongbri studied Liberal Arts and Classics at the University of Texas at Austin and Religious Studies at Yale University, where he completed his doctorate. His career has taken him to Macquarie University in Australia, Oberlin College, Aarhus University and the MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society in Oslo. For around two decades, he has researched ancient Christian manuscripts, the history of the codex, and papyrology. The award marks a major success for UWA in the ‘Global Minds’ competition.

Papyri from antiquity and manuscripts from the Middle Ages are often preserved in the same libraries and archives. Yet they are usually studied separately, divided by disciplinary traditions and specialised methods. The ‘Papyri and Manuscripts: Exploring Layers of Ages’ project (PAMELA) bridges this divide. It combines papyrology and manuscript studies with conservation science, archaeometry, digital humanities, and artificial intelligence to examine the material composition of written artefacts, recognise and compare scripts, reconstruct dispersed collections, and trace the production and transmission of texts. At the CSMC, which is one of 15 research institutions and libraries collaborating in PAMELA, archaeometrist Claudia Colini and ancient historian Kaja Harter-Uibopuu are involved.

Many historical libraries and collections from the Islamic world have been dispersed over time. Their holdings are now scattered across numerous countries and institutions. Reconstructing these libraries is a complex task, and seal impressions can provide important clues. The ‘Database for Seal Impressions from the Islamic Cultural Sphere’ project puts these important paratextual sources centre stage, examining their functions, chronological and geographical contexts, and the people and institutions associated with them. The project is a collaboration of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Bibliotheca Arabica at the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig, the Leipzig University’s Computing Centre, and the CSMC.

What can paper reveal about the history of technology, cultural exchange, and knowledge transmission? Lingyan Qiu and documentary filmmaker Guang Jin are currently conducting an international research and documentary project, entitled ‘Paper and Civilization’, which explores how local environments and practical needs influenced different papermaking traditions, and how these traditions interacted across Eurasia. Their investigations have taken the team to papermaking regions across China and to museums and libraries in Europe. In September, they travelled to Hamburg to meet paper specialist Agnieszka Helman-Ważny and Sinologists Uta Lauer, Ondřej Škrabal and Thies Staack, to discuss the contrast between Chinese papers, which are commonly made from locally available plant fibres, and European handmade papers, which are historically produced from recycled linen and hemp textiles.

When we encounter an ancient stone bearing a Greek or Latin inscription, our first instinct is usually to ask what it says. However, the stone itself provides at least as many interesting insights as the text, as the ancient historian Kaja Harter-Uibopuu writes in the ‘Doing the Research’ column of the Hamburger Abendblatt, in which UHH researchers describe their work and personal motivations every two weeks. ‘An inscription is more than a text. It is a man-made object with a history of its own. To understand it fully, I need to approach it as it was originally conceived: as a monument whose text, material and physical setting were all closely interconnected.’

The Eduard Duckesz Prize is awarded every two years by the Eduard Duckesz Fellow (Hamburg) and the Moses Mendelssohn Academy in Halberstadt and is endowed with 3,000 Euros. It recognises outstanding and innovative work in the fields of Jewish Studies. This year, it was awarded to the Polish literary scholar and Sephardic studies expert Agnieszka August-Zarębska (Wrocław) and Sebastian Schirrmeister, who led the project ‘A Fresh Look: Visualising Digitised German-Jewish Archives’ at the CSMC, building on his earlier work as Research Associate on ‘Wandering Artefacts: The Materialistic History of German-Jewish Archives’. The projects focused on digitising and making accessible a substantial collection of handwritten estates belonging to German-Jewish intellectuals from the early 20th century, which are held at the National Library of Israel.

As the winner of the 2025 J.P. Gumbert Dissertation Award, Jake Benson spent the past six weeks as a fellow at the CSMC. On 30 September, an award ceremony took place to mark the end of his stay. Tilman Seidensticker (Arabic and Islamic studies), delivered the laudatory speech. Jake, who completed his PhD in Persian Studies at Leiden University, wrote his dissertation on paper marbling – known as ‘abrī’ (clouding) in Persian – which emerged during an initial ‘first wave’ in the long sixteenth century. The 2025 J.P. Gumbert Dissertation Award was presented to two researchers. The other winner is Eugene Matanky, who received the award for his work ‘Esoteric Labour: The Making of Cordoverean Kabbalah’. 

During fieldwork in ancient Miletus, different eras collide: some of the methods used there to document inscriptions date back to the 19th century. Others are so advanced that the early excavators could not have imagined them. In late summer this year, Kaja Harter-Uibopuu and her team, Ann-Lauren Osthof, Selcen Köroğlu, and Sercan Kılıçkaya, spent a week in ancient Miletus. One focus of their campaign was to explore an area that had been excavated in 2025, to the south of the market in Miletus. Several inscriptions had been uncovered here that had not been seen since the early excavations at the beginning of the twentieth century. Encountering these stones again after more than a hundred years offered an opportunity to examine them with fresh eyes.