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Visiting Scholar in Comparative Cultural Studies 2023-24
- Assistant Professor at the Department of History and Ethnology, Democritus University of Thrace
Research topic during fellowship: Gods on the move: divine mobility in Hellenistic and Roman Macedonia.
Eleni Fassa studied Classical Philology at the University of Athens (BA), Ancient Drama at the University of Exeter (MA) and Hellenistic and Roman History at the University of Athens (PhD). In 2017-2019 she was a post-doctoral fellow and recipient of the fund (by the Greek State Scholarships Foundation & the National Strategic Reference Framework) at the National Hellenic Research Foundation (Institute of Greek and Roman Antiquity) for the research program “The Egyptian Gods in Macedonia: cultic experience of diversity and acculturation strategies in Greco-Roman Macedonia”. Her research focuses on the religious and cultural history of the Greco-Roman East. She is especially interested in Isiac and other “Oriental cults” of the eastern Mediterranean, in the religious history of Macedonia, in the integration of divinities perceived as foreign, and in the spiritual communities of late Hellenism. She is the author of Julian the Syrian: Letters to Iamblichus (2016), The birth of a cult: Sarapis and the Ptolemies in 3rd century Alexandria (2020), Bread and Games: Violence and Entertainment in the Greco-Roman world (2023). She is currently an assistant professor of Hellenistic and Roman History at the Democritus University of Thrace.