Pro Futura Scientia Fellow, Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala, Sweden; Researcher, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall, Sweden; Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Egyptological Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia; Docent in Early Christian and Coptic Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland.
Academic interests
I was born in 1986 in Moscow, USSR. In 2008, I received my Specialist Diploma (equivalent to an M.A.) in Religious Studies from the Department of Religious Studies at the Faculty of Philosophy, Moscow State University. As a student, I became interested in the Gospel of Thomas, an early Christian text whose only complete copy survives in Coptic (i.e., the last developmental stage of the Egyptian language), which would later become the topic of my candidate’s (Moscow State University, 2012) and doctoral dissertations (University of Helsinki, 2016). My doctoral dissertation, entitled “The Gospel of Thomas and Plato: A Study of the Impact of Platonism on the ‘Fifth Gospel,’” was recently published in the series Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2018).
Over the recent years, my research interests have shifted from early Christian studies to Coptic philology. I am currently working to publish various hitherto unedited manuscripts in Coptic, both documentary and literary. I am especially enchanted with Coptic dialectology, an area of research focusing on the dialects of Coptic, which in many respects remains unexplored. In 2019, for instance, my publication of the first edition of fragments of the Epistle to the Hebrews written in the early Bohairic dialect of Coptic I had discovered at the National Library of Russia in Saint Petersburg became only the fifth manuscript written in this dialect to be published. My fascination with Coptic dialects lies at the heart of my Pro Futura Scientia project, entitled The Neglected Dialects: A Study of the Manuscripts and Literature in Fayyūmic and Bohairic Coptic.