Award Ceremony will be Held at the Open DayMallory E. Matsumoto and Madalina Toca Win J.P. Gumbert Dissertation Award

3 June 2022

Photo: Mallory E. Matsumoto / Madalina Toca

We are happy to announce the winners of the J.P. Gumbert Award 2022. Like last year, the award goes to two recent PhDs: Mallory E. Matsumoto (Brown University) and Madalina Toca (KU Leuven).

Both winners have made excellent contributions to manuscript studies. The thesis of Mallory E. Matsumoto is entitled Sharing Script: Development and Transmission of Hieroglyphic Practices among Classic Maya Scribes. Based on epigraphic and palaeographic analysis, she places classic Maya hieroglyphs in socio-political context and argues that variation in how scribes wrote reflects the decentralised trajectories through which they exchanged knowledge about the writing system and how to use it. Her dissertation is a highly innovative contribution to the study of writing practices in the classical period of the Maya, based on a methodological approach that is being pursued systematically for the first time. It is fundamental research on the palaeography of maya writing.

The thesis of Madalina Toca is entitled Letters from Pelusium. Studies in the Reception, Formation, and Historicity of the Isidorian Epistolary Corpus. By the means of a comparative study of compiling practices of excerpting and rearranging the letters of the fifth century epistolary corpus attributed to Isidore of Pelusium, she traces the emergence of distinct Isidorian reception profiles reflected in thematic collections across Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Slavonic manuscript traditions. Her dissertation is a novel and important contribution to the long debate in scholarship on the authenticity of Isodore’s letters as well as to a range of topics highly relevant in manuscript studies, including corpora, epistolography, multilingual transmission, and more.

The award ceremony will be held during the Open Day of CSMC and the Cluster of Excellence on 10 June, 5:00 pm.

The J.P. Gumbert Dissertation Award honours the best doctoral thesis defended in each year that contributes to any aspect of the study of manuscripts and other written artefacts. Johan Peter Gumbert (1936-2016) was Professor and Professor Emeritus of Western Palaeography and Codicology at Leiden University from 1979 to 2001, and an expert on Latin and Dutch manuscripts. As a frequent guest at the Universität Hamburg, he was associated with the CSMC from its very beginning as well as with the COMSt-Network (Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies).

Previous winners of the award are Jeremiah Coogan and Hui Sun, who will join CSMC as a fellow this June.