Thesiss

Shenoute of Atripe was born around 350 CE and died one hundred and fifteen years later in 465. In that span of time the way people construed their world was irrevocably altered. The founder of his own particular brand of communal monasticism, and the father of literary Coptic, S…

This dissertation examines the process which I have called the ‘production of modern Coptic identity’. I have chosen the term ‘production’ in order to evoke the complex effect that various forces and institutions have had on the creation of modern ‘Copticness’. My research aims …

Shenoute of Atripe (ca. 350-465 C.E.) is Coptic Egypt's foremost ancient author. His writings are both a towering monument in the history of Coptic literature and a valuable resource for historical, linguistic, and biblical research. But the study of Shenoute's works is hampered…

Since the 1946 discovery of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, the relationship between the sayings found in this collection (almost all of them attributed to Jesus) and the synoptic gospels has been disputed. Some have affirmed that the sayings in the Coptic texts reflect a line of t…

This edition, translation, and analysis of the Martyrdom of John of Phanijoit demonstrates how the text functions as a polemical response of Coptic Christians to their own community's assimilation to Islam in the thirteenth century. Sociological analysis reveals this martyrdom's…

The rapid increase of rhetorical and thematic elements in Coptic literature emphasizing the land and people of Egypt during the centuries following the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE) was interpreted by many scholars in the early twentieth-century as a sign of Egyptian nationalism…

The Coptic textile discussed in this qualifying paper is owned by the textile dealer Craig Wallen. It was kept in storage due to its fragile and fragmented condition; the existing fibers run the gambit from extremely dry and disintegrating to extremely stiff and inflexible. The …

This dissertation studies the history of the reception of the Psalm headings (also called the inscriptions, superscriptions, or titles) from the original Hebrew text into the main early versions of Greek, Latin, Coptic, Syriac, and Targumic Aramaic. This material has proven diff…

This dissertation considers the history of a Coptic imagination by examining Copto-Arabic sources which describe medieval Egypt during the Fatimid period (969-1171 CE). Copto-Arabic literature laments the Islamization and Arabization of Egypt and Copto-Arabic writers are keen on…

This dissertation aims to expose the connections between textuality, morality, and political power in nineteenth-century Egypt. The thesis of the dissertation is that the principal aim of nineteenth-century educationalists in Egypt was to eliminate an oral culture in which the s…

This is an ethnographic study of Coptic immigrant churches in North America. I argue that the Coptic Church places greater importance on its youth from the second generation in immigrant societies. "A church without youth is a church without a future" is an often-repeated quote …

The present study will examine the identity of the Coptic Christian community of Egypt during the latter years of the Ayyubid dynasty (1171-1250 CE) in that area. In particular, it will consider the context surrounding the patriarchate of Cyril III Ibn Laqlaq, whose archived cor…

When Islam was half as old it is today, Egypt was swept by mass conversions that irrevocably altered its religious history and demographic composition. In the early 8th/14th century, unprecedented pressures delivered a final blow to the Coptic Christian community's hitherto priv…