Maria Nowak
Maria Nowak (prof. UW, dr. hab., Principal Investigator) is a professor of Roman law at the University of Warsaw. Her research interests concern the history of law and legal practice in Greco-Roma Egypt, especially testamentary practice, status and family, and recently also the late antique archives of Aphrodito and Western Thebes and their socio-legal context. She is the author of two monographs – Wills in the Roman Empire. A Documentary Approach (Warsaw 2015, full book https://academia.edu/resource/work/22876090) and Bastards in Egypt. Legal and Social Illegitimacy in the Roman Era (Leuven 2020, full book https://academia.edu/resource/work/39847419), three collective volumes and a few dozen studies published as book chapters and journal articles, as well as editions of documentary papyri.
Marzena Wojtczak
Marzena Wojtczak (dr., collaborator) is a lawyer and a historian. She graduated from the University of Warsaw in 2011 (with MA degree in law) and in 2014 (with degree BA in history). She defended her PhD (Arbitration and Settlement of Claims in Late Antiquity) in a cotutelle between the University of Warsaw and the University of Basque Country in September 2016. Since then she holds a position of an assistant professor at the Chair of Roman Law and the Law of Antiquity (University of Warsaw). She is a beneficiary of DAAD (University of Heidelberg) and DAI (Munich) scholarships. In 2018 and 2019 she obtained a Forschungsstipendium für Post-Doc at the Institut für Rechtsgeschichte, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster (Project: ‘Römische Senatsbeschlüsse’). In 2020 she was a Visiting Research Fellow at IASH at the University of Edinburgh. Currently, she is an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin (Ägyptologisches Seminar).
Her research focuses on the functioning of law in Imperium Romanum in Late Antiquity (from 4th until 8th cent.), legal papyrology, history of legal thought, as well as legal anthropology and sociology. In particular, she is interested in confronting normative sources with papyri and literary sources, which offers insight into the legal practice and daily life of people inhabiting the Roman Empire.
Constantinos Balamoshev
Constantinos Balamoshev (dr., collaborator) is an assistant professor of Papyrology at the Faculty of Archaeology of the University of Warsaw. His current research centres around Greek papyri and ostraca from the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods. This includes the study of the language, historical background and palaeography. Within the scope of the project Constantinos deals with the edition of texts from the archive of Dioskoros, correcting old readings, suggesting new and re-editing old editions. He is also the principal investigator of a University sub-project relating to edition of unpublished papyri from the archive of Dioskoros.
For a list of publications, see https://uw.academia.edu/ConstantinosBalamoshev.
Michael Konstantinou-Rizos
Michail Konstantinou-Rizos (dr., collaborator) is a philologist and palaeographer. He is a researcher at the University of Warsaw, Department of Law and Administration, and a member of the research project ‘Law in Social Networks of Late Antique Aphrodito’. He studied at the University of Athens (BA in History and Archaeology) and at Royal Holloway, University of London (MA in Late Antique and Byzantine studies, PhD). His doctoral thesis was the editio princeps of Thomas Aquinas’ Quaestiones disputatae de potentia and Quaestio disputata de spiritualibus creaturis in Byzantine Greek translation by Prochoros Kydones (ca. 1330-1369/71), to be published by the Corpus Christianorum – Series Graeca, Thomas de Aquino Byzantinus (Brepols: Turnhout). He has worked in a number of palaeographical research projects, including the international research project Thomas de Aquino Byzantinus, and has participated in seven palaeographical missions to the Library and the Archive of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchates of Alexandria and Jerusalem respectively. He has taught Classical Latin at the London Summer School in Classics, run by University College London and King’s College. He teaches Ancient Greek for the The Dan Slușanschi Summer School for Classical and Oriental Languages, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Medieval Latin for the National Hellenic Research Foundation in Athens, and Classical Latin for the Philosophy Department of the University of Athens.
Witold Tokarski
Witold Tokarski (PhD candidate, collaborator) is a classical philologist with a special interest in historical Indo-European linguistics and ancient poetry metres. His research focuses on historical phonology of Classical and Archaic Latin and Greek using constraint-based analyses, mainly Optimality Theory and its variants. Within the framework the research project ‘Law in Social Networks of Late Antique Aphrodito’ his main duties consist of the philological study of the investigated papyri, the examination of the collected material, and the preparation of source compilations and preliminary social network analyses. Witold finished his MA at the University of Warsaw and taught Latin at the History Faculty, Archaeology Faculty and the Law and Administration Faculty, as well as at the Chopin University of Music in Warsaw; he has also taught Latin and Greek for the Polish Philological Society.
Michał Bojanowski
Michał Bojanowski (dr., collaborator) is a computational sociologist and a seasoned R developer and trainer. His main research interests focus on (dynamics of) social networks and mathematical/computational social science as tools for understanding conflict and cooperation. He is an assistant professor at the Chair of Quantitative Methods and Information Technology, Kozminski University where, among other things, he teaches econometrics, social network analysis and some other data-analysis-related courses. He is also a researcher at the COALESCE Lab, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona participating in the Patchwork project. Within the framework of the research project ‘Law in Social Networks of Late Antique Aphrodito’, Michał’s involvement consists of the construction of a database enabling the social networks analysis.
For more on Michał, see: https://michalbojanowski.com
Joanna Wilimowska
Joanna Wilimowska (dr., collaborator) is Assistant Professor at the Chair of Roman Law and the Law of Antiquity, University of Warsaw. She a historian and classical philologist and she received PhD in Ancient History from the University of Wrocław in 2019. She specialises in documentary papyrology and epigraphy with particular focus on the social and economic history of Ptolemaic Egypt. At present, she coordinates a research project entitled Priests and temple personnel in Ptolemaic Egypt: social and economic aspects financed by the National Science Centre, Poland. Her publications include Benefactions toward Temples in the Ptolemaic Fayum (JARCE 54, 2018) and Sacred Animal Cult Workers in the Ptolemaic Fayum (JJP 50, 2020). She has published also on the epigraphic culture in ancient Egypt: The Epigraphic Curve of the Fayum Oasis (ed. by Nawotka, Routledge 2021) and Language Changes in the Epigraphic Culture of Late Antique Egypt (ed. by Nowakowski & Minets, Brill 2023).
Aleksandra Świdurska
Aleksandra Świdurska (PhD candidate, collaborator) is a classical philologist whose main interests lie in literature, with a particular emphasis on poetry. Her most recent research (2023) focused on the poem “Alexandra” and its the Byzantine paraphrase, which has been translated into a modern language and analyzed for the first time. Currently, she is engaged in the ‘Law in Social Networks of Late Antique Aphrodito,’ project, where she is investigating various types of documents from the 6th century village of Aphrodite. In October 2024, she began her studies at the Doctoral School of Humanities in Warsaw where she is preparing a thesis titled “δι᾽ ἐμοῦ ἐγράφη: the role of writing practices and forms in Byzantine Egyptian legal transactions” under the supervision of prof. dr. hab. Maria Nowak.