Stefanie Rudolf

Stefanie Rudolf completed her Masters in Oriental Studies and German linguistics in Erlangen and Aleppo (Syria) with a thesis on the linguistic datability of Old Testament texts. After a scholarship at the Excellence Cluster TOPOI, Berlin, she was awarded her PhD at the Freie Universität Berlin for a dissertation on Syriac astrology.

Stefanie taught at the Department of Semitic Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, from 2014 to 2020, and joined the project “New Papyri from Elephantine” at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2021. At the MPIWG, she is a fellow of the Research Group “Experience in the Premodern Sciences of Soul and Body,” where she investigates how early Syriac scholars understood and recorded bodily and emotional experiences in medical contexts. With Katja Krause, she organized the working group “Syriac Wisdom,” the results of which will soon be published by De Gruyter as Histories of Wisdom in the Syriac World.

Stefanie is currently working on her second book, Ethiopic Loanwords in the Qur’ān: Uncovering Africa’s Linguistic Influence on the Arabian Peninsula, as part of the ERC-funded QaSLA project at the University of Tübingen, and a Mandaic Sourcebook on Magic and Medicine with Markham Geller and Bogdan Burtea.