Coptic Christianity Conference

Between Archives and the Field: Cross-cutting Methods in Coptic Studies

May 19-21, 2025
Fordham University Lincoln Center Campus

The Orthodox Christian Studies Center is pleased to announce its inaugural conference in Coptic Christianity in the spring of 2025.

Whereas scholarly debate tends be organized along lines of periodization, this interdisciplinary conference aims to advance the study of Coptic Christianity in Egypt and its diasporas by drawing together scholars from anthropology, art history, history, literature, politics, sociology, and theology whose research highlights points of connection between late antiquity and the modern world. Convened by Dr. Mina Ibrahim (Marburg University) and Dr. Mona Oraby (Howard University), established and early-career scholars who work with a wide variety of sources will consider how the deliberate exchange and adoption of new methods enriches our understanding of institutions, heritage, otherness, and memory. 

The conference is free and open to the public. Registration required.

Register Now

Conference Schedule

Monday, May 19

Registration
3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

Opening Remarks
4:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.

Opening Keynote (Andrea Myers Achi and Michelle Al-Ferzly)
4:30 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.

Welcome Reception
6:00 p.m.

Tuesday, May 20

Continental Breakfast
9:00 a.m. – 9:30 a.m.

Panel 1: Institutions (Febe Armanios, Beth Baron, Gaétan du Roy)
9:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.

Lunch*
11:30 a.m. – 1:30 p.m.

Panel 2: Heritage (Stephen Davis, Mina Monier, Carolyn Ramzy)
1:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.

Panel 3: Otherness (Anna Hager, Mourad Takawi, Mary Youssef)
3:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.

Wednesday, May 21

Continental Breakfast
8:30 a.m. – 9:00 a.m.

Panel 4: Memory (Heather Badamo, Safwat Marzouk, Miray Philips)
9:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.

Closing Keynote (Angie Heo)
11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.

Closing Remarks
12:30 p.m. – 12:45 p.m.

Speakers

Keynote Speakers

Andrea Myers Achi
Michelle Al-Ferzly
“Connecting Histories: Community Outreach and Educational Initiatives in 'Africa and Byzantium'”

Andrea Myers Achi is an art historian specializing in Late Antique, Byzantine, and Coptic art, focusing on the intersections of these traditions across diverse cultural and geographic contexts. As the Mary and Michael Jaharis Associate Curator of Byzantine Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, she leads the museum’s efforts to integrate Coptic art within the broader scope of medieval art and cross-cultural exchange. Achi is a prolific writer and speaker, contributing to leading academic journals, edited volumes, and international conferences. Her research has deepened understanding of monastic life, book production, and artistic exchange in Coptic communities. Passionate about public engagement, Achi is dedicated to fostering inclusive dialogues that bring attention to the complexities and interconnections within Coptic and Byzantine art.

Michelle Al-Ferzly is the curator of Islamic world collections at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library at Yale University. She holds a PhD in art history from the University of Michigan, and her research focuses on cross-cultural connections between Christian and Islamicate communities in the medieval Mediterranean. Through her research and curatorial practice, Michelle is focused on rendering collections and histories accessible to wider audiences, particularly diaspora and immigrant communities from the Middle East and North Africa.

Angie Heo
“Decolonizing Coptic Studies: Heritage, History, Geography”

Angie Heo is an associate professor in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. After receiving her PhD in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley, she taught at Barnard College and held fellowships at Emory University and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. She is the author of The Political Lives of Saints: Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt (University of California Press, 2018). Her current research turns to the history and politics of Protestant Christianity in Korea.

Panelists

Febe Armanios
“Fragmented Archives: Narrating the History of Coptic Television through Ephemeral Sources”

Febe Armanios is the Philip Battell and Sarah Frances Cowles Stewart Professor of History at Middlebury College. She specializes in Middle Eastern Christian communities, particularly Egypt's Copts, with research interests in comparative religious practices, food history, and media studies. She has received numerous fellowships including from the Fulbright Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Luce Foundation-ACLS. Armanios is author of Coptic Christianity in Ottoman Egypt (Oxford University Press, 2011) and Halal Food: A History (with Boǧaç Ergene, Oxford University Press, 2018). Her third monograph, Satellite Ministries: The Rise of Christian Television in the Middle East, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2025. Armanios co-edits, with Angie Heo, a book series titled Coptic Studies in Historical and Cultural Context published by the American University in Cairo Press.

Heather Badamo
"Veiling Coptic Scripture: A Material Culture Approach to Medieval Bibles"

Heather A. Badamo is an associate professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her work investigates the visual manifestations of exchange in the eastern Mediterranean, focusing on Christian-Muslim contact. Her first book, Saint George Between Empires: Image and Encounter in the Medieval East (Penn State University Press, 2023), explores the political repurposing of Saint George by competing states and communities during the era of the Crusades. Her publications appear in Gesta, RES, and The Medieval Globe. She is currently the consortium scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, where she’s at work on a book about the “Copto-Arabic Renaissance.” It considers how medieval Coptic elites employed the sacred arts to ensure communal survival in the midst of seismic linguistic and cultural transformations.

Beth Baron
"Compassionate Care: Dr. Naguib Mahfouz and the Coptic Hospital"

Beth Baron is Distinguished Professor of History at The City College and Graduate Center of the City University of New York and director of the Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center at the CUNY Graduate Center. A former editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies and former president of the Middle East Studies Association, she currently chairs the MESA Global Academy for displaced scholars. Her books include The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood (Stanford University Press, 2014), Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (University of California Press, 2005), and The Women’s Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press (Yale University Press, 1994). She is a co-editor of three books, including most recently The Oxford Handbook of Modern Egyptian History (2024).

Stephen Davis
“Curating the Cult of the Saints at the Egyptian Monastery of the Syrians: Hagiographical Practice and Coptic Cultural Heritage”

Stephen J. Davis is Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies and Professor of History at Yale University. His publications include The Cult of St. Thecla (Oxford University Press, 2001), The Early Coptic Papacy (AUC Press 2004), Coptic Christology in Practice (Oxford University Press, 2008), Christ Child (Yale University Press, 2014), Monasticism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2018), and The Gnostic Chapters (Brill, 2023). He is also the founding editor-in-chief of the Christian Arabic Texts in Translation series (Fordham University Press). For the past two decades, he has been engaged in archaeological, archival, and cultural heritage practice in Egypt as the founding director of the Yale Monastic Archaeology Project (YMAP) and a related Project to Catalogue the Coptic and Arabic Manuscripts at Dayr al-Suryān.

Gaétan du Roy
“Approaching the Interplay Between Charisma, Tradition, and Institution: The case of Father Samaan”

Gaétan du Roy earned his PhD from the University of Louvain in Belgium. His doctoral research dealt with the Zabbalin community in Cairo. He approached the life of this mostly Coptic neighborhood through oral histories and ethnographic fieldwork. Du Roy then started new fieldwork in Shubra, a “middle-class” area where Christians account for a considerable share of the population. This research sought to understand the dynamics of inter-religious relations through the interweaving of practices and discourses. Du Roy subsequently took part in a research project at the University of Nijmegen on the history of Middle Eastern Christians in Europe. He currently works in the Scientific Research Department of the French-speaking Belgian administration (Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles). He is the author of Les Zabbalin du Muqattam: Ethnohistoire d’une hétérotopie au Caire (979-2021), published by Brill in 2022.

Anna Hager
“The Useful Other: Copts in Islamist and Salafi Narratives”

Anna Hager is a research fellow at the University of Vienna, Austria, where she works on her second book on the Syriac Orthodox community in Lebanon. Her research includes modern Islamic movements, Christians in the Middle East, and Christian-Muslim relations. She previously held research and teaching positions at Princeton University and the Institute for Eastern Christian Studies (IvOC) in the Netherlands. Her book, Christian-Muslim Relations in the Aftermath of the Arab Spring: Beyond the Polemics over “The Innocence of Muslims,” was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2024. She is also the founder of the Network Promoting the Field of Middle Eastern Christianity.

Safwat Marzouk
“The Representation of Egypt in the Old Testament and Coptic Identity”

Safwat Marzouk is an Egyptian Presbyterian whose research interests include thinking theologically about monsters in the Bible, ancient Near East, and popular culture; constructing the Other in the Old Testament; Middle Eastern Christian hermeneutics; and immigration and the Bible. He is the author of two books: Egypt as a Monster in the Book of Ezekiel (Mohr Siebeck, 2015) and Intercultural Church: A Biblical Vision for an Age of Migration (Fortress Press, 2019).He is currently working on a commentary for the New Interpretation Series of Westminster John Knox Press entitled Exodus: A Commentary. Dr. Marzouk was ordained as a pastor in 2002 by the Delta Presbytery of the Synod of the Nile, the governing body of the Presbyterian Church in Egypt, and in May 2021 he joined the Wabash Valley Presbytery of PC (USA).

Mina Monier
“Manuscript Evidence for Multilingual and Cross-Denominational Research in Medieval Coptic Works: The Case of Ibn al-ʿAssāl’s Tetraevangelion”

Mina Monier is an Egyptian-British scholar of early Christianity and digital humanities. He is currently a researcher (Seniorforsker) and the Director of the MF Lab for Manuscript Studies and Digital Research (MF L-MaSDR) at the MF Norwegian School of Theology in Oslo. He received his PhD in the New Testament from King’s College London, followed by a fellowship in Textual Criticism and Digital Humanities in Lausanne, Switzerland. His publications include Temple and Empire: The Context of the Temple Piety of Luke—Acts (Fortress Academic, 2020) and When Jesus Rose Early: Studies on the Text and Paratexts of Mark’s Ending (Brill, 2025).

Miray Philips
“Conflictual Representations of the Coptic Question in Religious, Human Rights, and Development Fields”

Miray Philips is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Toronto. Her work explores the transnational politics, meaning, and memory of violence and suffering. Her current book project explores conflictual representations of religious difference in the context of the global war on terror. Empirically, it explores claims-making by various transnational actors between Washington, DC and Egypt on behalf of Christians in the Middle East. Her collaborative projects examine knowledge production and collective memories of mass violence, specifically in Syria. Her research is published in scholarly journals such as the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Memory Studies, and the Minnesota Journal of International Law. Miray Philips also engages in public-facing work and currently sits on the board of advisors of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy.

Carolyn Ramzy
“Re-searching Coptic Digital Diasporas, North American Online Activism, and Indigenist-Centered Methodologies”

Carolyn Ramzy is an associate professor and ethnomusicologist in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University. Her research focuses on Egyptian Christian popular music in Egypt and a quickly growing diaspora community in the United States and Canada. Specifically, she examines how Coptic music is gendered, as well as the discursive politics of the community’s Arabic religious songs in the lives of Coptic Orthodox women. Her current project explores women’s use of virtual spaces, such as Instagram to chat, sing, and mobilize around the genres that Orthodox women cannot lead in real life. She has published in Ethnomusicology, Ethnos, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies as well as for the US Library of Congress Music division. She is also the curator of the "Coptic Women Sing Too Project" on the American Religious Sounds Project, funded by Ohio and Michigan State University.

Mourad Takawi
“Early Christian Arabic Discourses and their Contexts: The Questions of Patriarch Michael”

Mourad Takawi serves as chair of the Religious Studies Department at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas. He holds a PhD and MTS from the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Theology and a BA and MA in political science from the American University in Cairo, where he directed cross-cultural programming. His research explores Christian-Muslim encounters and Arabic Christian literature, focusing on interreligious interpretations of sacred texts. His forthcoming monograph, The Qurʾān as a Classic: Early Arabic Christian and Muslim Exegesis of the Qurʾān in the Interreligious Milieu, 8th-10th Centuries CE (De Gruyter) delves into these themes. He is currently co-editing the second volume of Medieval Encounters: Between Arabic-Speaking Christians and Islam, which examines the intersections of faith and identity in the medieval Middle East.

Mary Youssef
“Perennial Sojourners and the Decolonization of Coptic Identity: Two Copts in London”

Mary Youssef is an associate professor of Arabic studies in the Department of Middle Eastern and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Binghamton University, State University of New York. Her scholarship focuses on modern Arabic and Arab diasporic literature. She is the author of Minorities in the Contemporary Egyptian Novel published in 2018 in the series of Modern Arabic Literary Studies by Edinburgh University Press. Her other publications have appeared in Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics and JALA: Journal of the African Literature Association. She is currently a member on the editorial board for Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature.

Conveners

Mina Ibrahim

Mina Ibrahim is an anthropologist and archivist from Shubra, Cairo, Egypt. He is currently a visiting professor at Ghent University, Belgium, and a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Conflict Studies (Zentrum für Konfliktforschung) at the University of Marburg, Germany. He is the founder of Shubra’s Archive, Egypt’s first community-based neighborhood archive. Mina has extensive research and teaching experience in migration studies, cultures and histories of incarceration, archival practices, and human rights, with a focus on the MENA region and Europe. He has taught courses on ethnographic, artistic, and archival methods and has published in both English and Arabic, covering topics such as Coptic Christians, community archives, and justice in post-revolutionary contexts. He is the author of Identity, Marginalisation, Activism, and Victimhood in Egypt: Misfits in the Coptic Christian Community (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).

Mona Oraby

Mona Oraby is associate professor of political science at Howard University and editor of The Immanent Frame, a digital publication of the Social Science Research Council that advances scholarly debate on secularism, religion, and the public sphere. Oraby is the author of Devotion to the Administrative State: Religion and Social Order in Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2024) and coauthor of A Universe of Terms: Religion in Visual Metaphor (Indiana University Press, 2022). She has been a fellow or visiting scholar at the Center for Law, Society & Culture at Indiana University Maurer School of Law (Bloomington), the American Bar Foundation (Chicago), the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry at The New School (New York), the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (Göttingen), and the NYUAD Research Institute (Abu Dhabi). Her current book project explores how Black Americans imagine ancestral connection to the ancient dynasties of Egypt and the Nile Valley.