Sofia Melikyan
Sofia Melikyan (née Moiseeva) is a specialist in Christian Arabic literature in the Middle Ages. Her PhD dissertation Arabic Melkite Hagiography of the 9th–11th Centuries: Its Genre and Style Characteristics (2012, Moscow State University) was published as a monograph in Russian in 2015. She taught different courses on Christian Arabic literature at St. Tikhon's Orthodox University in Moscow (2007-2022) and contributed to the multivolume Orthodox Encyclopediaauthoring or co-authoring more than 100 entries on Eastern Christianity (2006-2025). She has also translated several hagiographical and poetical texts from Arabic and Greek into Russian andhas published articles on Christian Arabic hagiography, Bible exegesis, consolation literature, Christian-Muslim dialogue.
During her Visiting Scholarship, she will work on the project The Early Armenian Saints in Christian Arabic Sources. Through a comparative analysis of Arabic recensions of martyrdoms/lives, synaxaria, chronicles and related texts the project investigates how, and to what extent, these narratives were reinterpreted, reshaped, and authorized within Arabic-speaking Christian communities. The project aligns closely with the Armenian studies initiative currently pursued at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations under the leadership of Dr. Christina Maranci, with an emphasis on interconnected Eastern Christian traditions.