Researchers and Fellows

Dr. Lydia Bremer-McCollum (she/hers) is a feminist scholar of religion and ancient Christianities. She is interested in alternative, weird, and marginalized Christian practices in ancient and contemporary spacetimes. She is also a specialist in Coptic language and literature in late antiquity with a particular interest in discourses of soul travel, dreams, and visionary experiences. Lydia is currently working on revising her first monograph project titled The Hauntological Book: Specters of Religion, Race, and Desire in the Study of Ancient Books where she outlines a materialist-feminist historiographical approach and explores questions of inheritance and haunting in the study of ancient book artifacts and practices. She examines how race, ethnicity, class, and eros materialize within the archive and form the tools, practices, and norms of the study of ancient languages and book artifacts. Lydia’s work demonstrates how the apparatus of study structurally excludes the possibility for diversity and alterity. Her project seeks to create a more expansive and inclusive fantasy life of ancient books.  Dr. Bremer-McCollum is the 2023-24 Postdoctoral Fellow on the NEH-funded grant "Expanding Coptic Digital Online Collections" for the Coptic Scriptorium Project. As part of the Coptic Scriptorium project, she looks forward to sharing her love of Coptic language-learning and teaching and to expanding the project’s accessible Coptic corpus.

Dr. Nicholas Wagner is a Digital Humanities Specialist (Coptic Studies) for University of Oklahoma's Expanding Coptic Digital Online Collections as well as Postdoctoral Associate at Duke University (Department of Classical Studies). His research interests broadly span the cultural histories of early Judaism and Christianity, with a focus on books, readers, and reading in late antiquity.