Eliana dal Sasso and Simon Schiff Successfully Defend their PhD Dissertations

5 December 2024

Photo: CSMC

Congratulations to Eliana dal Sasso and Simon Schiff! Both of them recently defended their PhD dissertations in Egyptology and Computer Science, respectively.

During his doctoral project, Simon Schiff was part of ‘Data Linking’ (Research Field F) at the Cluster of Excellence UWA, and contributed greatly to the insights gained in this research field. On 25 November 2024, he defended his dissertation, which deals with making research data accessible to non-IT experts. Simon was supervised by Ralf Möller.

Four days later, on 29 November, Eliana dal Sasso passed her viva voce examination. Eliana wrote her dissertation about ‘Bookbindings as Instruments of Classification: Defining, Ordering, and Transmitting Knowledge in Christian Egypt (4th–12th centuries)’, in which she explored the relationship between the binding and the context of manuscripts by examining a corpus of Egyptian Christian codices dated between the 4th and 12th centuries. She shows that early Egyptian bindings can be understood as tools that, by adding a layer of content beyond the textual one, help to identify the typology of texts and thus to classify them. Her project was supervised by Alessandro Bausi.