Guest Lectures (MagEIA meets Kurdish Linguistics)

In the SCIAS guest lectures, the visiting professors and their hosts of the university introduce themselves and their research areas in the lecture hall of the Welz house to fellow guests, hosts and an interested audience of the university and the city in short 20-minute keynote lectures. Afterwards, all the participants have the opportunity to discuss and learn more about the respective projects and research areas to promote international and interdisciplinary exchange, dialogue and cooperation.

Speakers:

• Prof. Dr. Mersha Mengistie (Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia): Yaqalam ʾAbǝnnat: The Magico-Medical Path to Intelligence in Ethiopia
• Dr. Francis Simons (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland): Burn your way to health and happiness - the Mesopotamian magical ceremony Šurpu
• Dr. Shuan Karim (University of Cambridge, United Kingdom): Archaism and Innovation in Kurdish

Prof. Dr. Mersha Mengistie is an Ethiopian Studies scholar, philologist, literary scholar and cultural activist. He holds a B.A. in Ethiopian Language and Literature (1997) and an M.A. in Literature (Foreign Languages) (2003), both from Addis Ababa University, and a Ph.D. in Ethiopian Studies and Philology (2010) from the University of Hamburg. His doctoral studies were supported by a DAAD scholarship. He also completed a Master's degree in Social Work at Addis Ababa University in 2023. Since June 2018, he has been an Associate Professor of Philology in the Department of Linguistics and Philology at Addis Ababa University.

Dr. Frank Simons is a postdoctoral researcher at Trinity College Dublin working on a project on Mesopotamian psychiatry. His research focuses on magic and divination in Mesopotamia, particularly the reconstruction and poetics of ancient texts. He is also interested in the realia of the ancient world and has recently published work on the identification of animals and diseases in cuneiform texts.

Dr. Shuan Karim is a Kurdish-American linguist focusing on the diachronic study of the Iranian languages, particularly those spoken in the Kurdish region. He is currently an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellow at JMU. Additionally, he is interested in synchronic topics in linguistics, including inferential-realizational morphology, categorial grammars (syntax), and language documentation.

The presentation and the following discussion are open to the public and will be held in English. All interested parties are welcome!

For more information, please consult the official invitation. Registration is requested.

Contact: SCIAS Office, scias-office@uni-wuerzburg.de