May 29, 2025
MELC is pleased to share the following news about its graduate students:
- Jason Silvestri, Doaa Atamna, Jessica Johnson, and Sumayyah Bostan have been awarded the Graduate Division’s Summer Dissertation Writing Grants for Advanced Arts and Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences Students. This program provides summer funding for select PhD candidates who have advanced to candidacy so that they can engage in full-time dissertation writing during the summer. The ultimate goal of this program is to assist doctoral students in making significant progress towards filing their dissertations.
- Beatrice de Faveri will soon publish “Emperor Worship in the Greek East” in the journal Religions in the Greco-Roman World.
- Jason Silvestri was elected the Lady Wallis Budge Junior Research Fellow in Egyptology at Christ College at Cambridge, a four-year position intended to support early-career Egyptologists in their research. Jason will begin his position in 2026.
- Jenna Norris received a Simpson Pre-Dissertation Fellowship from Berkeley's Global, International and Area Studies to support advanced field training in bioarchaeology in Romania this summer.
- Rachel Webberman received funding from the Center for Middle East Studies to deliver her paper, "“I Swing My Arms Like a Dove”: Techniques of Running in the Hymns of Šulgi" at the 70th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale in Prague this summer.
- Welcome new graduate students Reza Lakestani, Cosimo Ragone, Zahra Rashid, and Zain Yusaf to the department!
Congratulations to these and other MELC graduate students on their recent achievements!