Principal Investigator
Adrian C. Pirtea is the Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project RevIdEM. He is a historian of Eastern (Byzantine) and Oriental Christianity, specializing in Syriac Patristic, ascetic and mystical literature, but also in the connections between the Syriac world and other cultural areas (Byzantine, Arabic, Caucasian, Iranian) between ca. 300 and 1300 AD. He earned his PhD in Byzantine and Eastern Christian Studies from Freie Universität Berlin (2017) and has held research and teaching positions at the same institution, and in the Corpus Coranicum project at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (BBAW) from 2017 to 2020. Between 2020 and 2022, Adrian was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Vienna’s Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies. Since October 2023, he has been a Postdoctoral Researcher and Junior Resarch Group Leader at the Institute for Medieval Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Department of Byzantine Research). His current work within RevIdEM explores the Syriac and Christian Arabic reception of the Apophthegmata Patrum and Late Antique monastic hagiography among Melkite, Syro-Orthodox, and East Syriac Christians in the Eastern Mediterranean, Syria and northern Mesopotamia between the 11th and 13th centuries.