Our Staff

Beth Mardutho's many projects that it offers the Syriac academic and heritage communities are made possible through the dedicated work of talented volunteers around the world.

George A. Kiraz, PhD

Director

George A. Kiraz is the founder and director of Beth Mardutho. He founded Beth Mardutho in 1992 as an institution dedicated to furthering the study of Syriac and the Syriac tradition throughout the world. He has personally conceived and directed many projects at the institute, and his own personal library forms a significant portion of the Beth Mardutho Research Library. George has taught Syriac at Princeton University, Rutgers, and the POLIS Institute (Jerusalem). He received a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2017-2018 and is a current Research Associate. He has an MPhil and PhD in Computational Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where he wrote his thesis on computing the morphology of Arabic and Syriac.
Andreas Juckel, PhD

Senior Research Fellow

As the Senior Research Fellow at Beth Mardutho, Andreas Juckel continues his research on the Syriac New Testament and supports the Institute's various projects. Until his retirement, he was Research Associate at the Institute for New Testament Textual Research of the University of Münster. His main interests are the transmission and textual history of the Syriac NT versions, including their relation to the Greek. He has been serving on the editorial board of Hugoye, Journal of Syriac Studies since 2006. Together with George A. Kiraz, he is the General Editor of the Antioch Bible. He was accepted into the Syriac Orthodox Church by the then-Bishop Cyril Aphrem (now Patriarch) in 2012. His most recent publication is a critical edition of the Peshitta Corpus Paulinum (Gorgias Press).
Shelby Loster, MAT

Operations/Digital Humanities Projects Coordinator

Shelby Loster coordinates and enhances Simtho, Beth Mardutho's searchable database of Syriac literary texts, and SEDRA, Beth Mardutho's online Syriac dictionaries. She is responsible for the institute's online presence, the maintenance of Beth Mardutho's online classroom, and Bnay Beth Mardutho membership. Shelby was a Herman & Mary K. Seibel Fellow in 2019 and 2020 and is also a Beth Mardutho Syriac summer school alumna. She is an ordained elder in the Free Methodist Church and has an MA in Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary. Shelby also administrates the Syriac-English Bible Project for Gorgias Press.
Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent, PhD

Hugoye General Editor

Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent is the General Editor of Hugoye and an associate professor of Historical Theology and Syriac Patristics at Marquette University. Her publications focus on Syriac theology, hagiography, and ascetic literature. She is also an associate editor of syriaca.org.
James E. Walters, PhD

Hugoye Associate Editor

James E. Walters began working for Beth Mardutho in the summer of 2010, when he moved to Princeton to begin his doctoral work at Princeton Theological Seminary. James has worked on various projects at Beth Mardutho, such as cataloguing a large portion of the Beth Mardutho Research Library, maintaining the website, and managing the Bnay Beth Mardutho subscriptions. James' own academic work focuses on the early expressions of Christianity in the Syriac-speaking world and on the Syriac literature of the fourth century. He is an accomplished author with many publications, including contributions to the Gorgias Press Antioch Bible Series.
Slavomír Čéplö, PhD

Digital Philology Fellow

Slavomír Čéplö earned his PhD in Mathematical Linguistics from the Charles University in Prague in 2018. He has published extensively on Maltese linguistics, Arabic dialectology, creole linguistics and Christian apocrypha. He has also worked on a number of DH projects including HunayNNET and MPCD. At Beth Mardutho, he is responsible for the entire corpus-building pipeline, including developing NLP tools and models for Syriac.
Hannah Stork, MA

Language Instructor

Hannah Stork joined Beth Mardutho's Syriac language summer school as a Teaching Assistant in 2020, and is an Associate Editor of Hugoye. She is a PhD student in Religion at Yale University. Hannah also earned a BA from Middlebury College and an MA from the University of Chicago. She was the Dr. Talal and Mrs. Wesal Findakly Fellow in the Digital Humanities at Beth Mardutho in 2018, and she is a member of the English Translation Review Committee of the Antioch Bible.
Emily Chesley, MDiv

Communications Coordinator & Seminar Instructor

Emily Chesley manages communications at Beth Mardutho and teaches the weekly seminar for its graduate interns. A History PhD candidate at Princeton University, she received The Dr. Jack Jallo and Mrs. Gage Johnston Fellowship at Beth Mardutho in 2018. She has held fellowships at the Library of Congress and the Fulbright Commission, and she serves on the English Literary Critics Committee for the Syriac-English Bible. Emily holds a BA from Azusa Pacific University, an MDiv from Princeton Theological Seminary, and an MA in History from Princeton University.
Michael D. Ethington, MA

Simtho Assistant Editor

Michael D. Ethington deals with the acquisition of texts and with metadata for Simtho. He obtained his MA in Religious Studies from the Universities of Padua and Venice in 2023 with a thesis on an East Syriac hagiography, the Life of Rabban Bar ʿEdta. In 2023 he was also a Herman & Mary K. Seibel Fellow at Beth Mardutho. He is currently a doctoral student in History at the University of Lille, working on a prosopographic study of captives within and between Rome and Sasanian Iran in Syriac sources, within the wider project Ex-Patria, led by prof. Ekaterina Nechaeva.
Samir Shamoun

MelthoLAB Local Coordinator

Samir Shamoun is the local coordinator for MelthoLab, Beth Mardutho's Digital Humanities team in the Middle East. He is also the marketing director for BET KANU, a non-profit working to preserve endangered dialects of the Syriac language. Samir has a degree in Communication Engineering and lives in Syria.
Jennifer Griggs, PhD

Research Fellow

Jennifer Griggs works on the Latin prefaces and editorial notes on the Peshitta in the printed Syriac editions and Polyglot Bibles of early modern Europe. Her PhD at SOAS, University of London, was on the mystical hermeneutics of Gregory Bar Hebraeus, the thirteenth-century West Syrian Maphrian, and the influence of the Islamic tradition of philosophical theology on his mystical thought. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow with a Research Training Group (Graduiertenkolleg) on "Shaping Religious Pluralism between Christianity and Islam" with the institutes of theology at the University of Osnabrück. More recently, she held a Senior Research Fellowship with the Fondazione per le Scienze Religiose in Palermo, working on the revival of the Syriac sciences by Syriac Christians in the mixed confessional environment of the Islamicate East.