Leah Mascia

About

Leah Mascia is a Post-Doc researcher in Egyptology and Coptology at the Egyptological Seminar of the Freie Universität in Berlin and head of the Research Field “Inscribing Spaces” at the Cluster of Excellence “Understanding Written Artefacts”, Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, Universität Hamburg. She is also the Principal Investigator of the project “The Long Journey to the Underworld” (march 2022–December 2026), aimed at providing a thorough study of the production of inscribed funerary artefacts in Egypt between the Roman and the Late Antique periods.
Mascia defended her PhD thesis entitled “The Transition from Traditional Cults to the Affirmation of Christian Beliefs in the City of Oxyrhynchus” at the University of Hamburg in 2022. She has been trained as a field archaeologist and papyrologist at the University “La Sapienza” in Rome and refined her skills in over 10 years of research activities conducted in the field as a member of various archaeological missions. Archaeological investigations have been combined since the beginning of her PhD (2017) with constant research on written artefacts housed in museum collections and research institutions.
Leah Mascia is a senior member of the Archaeological Mission of the University of Barcelona working at the ancient site of Oxyrhynchus, where she is in charge of the Greek and Coptic papyrological and epigraphic documentation, and a senior member of the Archaeological mission of the University of Urbino investigating the ancient city of Cyrene (Libya).
Alongside didactic activities in Hamburg and Berlin, she is regularly teaching Egyptology at Helwan University in Cairo and organising workshops and training courses on behalf of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI-Kairo).