Mazzola, Marianna

Trained as an Oriental philologist at Pisa University, I earned a joint PhD in history from Ghent University and the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. My research pertains to the cultural and social history of the Medieval Middle East (7th–13th centuries), with a focus on Syriac Christianity and its relations with Byzantium and Islam. I am particularly interested in Syriac responses to interconfessional and intercultural contacts in the Byzantine and Islamicate world, especially the circulation and adaptation of sources, narratives and ideas in Syriac historiography and doctrinal excerpts collections, and Syriac Orthodox accommodation of former notions of political leadership under the new Islamic rule. Beside my historical research, I continue to engage in the philological endeavour of offering editions, translations, and commentary of Syriac historiographical texts.

From 2013 to 2017, I worked as doctoral researcher in the context of the ERC project “Memory of Empire: The Post-imperial Historiography of Late Antiquity” at Ghent University, which explored the historiographical traditions of the Mediterranean and their interaction. Within this framework, I contributed to the edition and study of fragmentary historians and carried out personal research on the Ecclesiastical History of Gregory Bar ʿEbroyo (13th century). My PhD aimed at studying this work against the background of the previous Byzantine and Syriac history tradition, discussing both the continuation of previous trends, the innovation of Bar ʿEbroyo as historiographer, and in what manner these relate to the specific sociopolitical context of the 13th-century Middle East.

In 2018, I joined the FWO Project “Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, Early Syriac Historiography and Its Byzantine and Arab Context (582–842)” as a postdoctoral researcher, working on the edition and study of Dionysius of Tel-Mahre’s Chronicle, with a focus on Christian–Muslim relations and the intersection of Syriac, Byzantine, and Muslim historiographical traditions in Dionysius’s work.

Following a period as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Christianity at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, from October 2022 I am undertaking a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Near and Middle Eastern Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU), Munich, working on the Syriac Orthodox conceptualization of kingship in the Umayyad and Abbasid periods, looking at the dynamics of persistence, rupture, and adaptation of former Roman-Christian concepts of politeia in the new Islamic political context.

Areas of Interest

medieval Middle East (7th–13th centuries), Syriac Christianity and its relations with Byzantium and Islam, Eastern Christian political thought in the Islamicate world, Syriac historiography, philology and codicology (including excerpt collections in transcultural comparison)

Historical Periods of Interest

7th through 13th centuries CE

Positions

Education