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

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

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

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.

Joan Shields

Joan Shields

Administration

Joan completed her BS in Computer Science and a minor in Business Administration at the University of Delaware.  After working several years programming for Unisys, she and her husband went into missionary work with college students, first at SUNY Buffalo and then at Rutgers University. Between teaching special-needs children, sales, teaching fitness classes, dabbling in web design with search engine optimization, and her daily household schedule, she is a natural at addressing many competing, simultaneous demands. She currently serves as office manager for Gorgias Press and as Administrative Assistant for Beth Mardutho.

Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent, PhD

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

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.

Hannah Stork, MA

Hannah Stork, MA

Hugoye Associate Editor & Language Instructor

Hannah Stork is Associate Editor of Hugoye and a PhD student in Religion at Yale University. She 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 joined Beth Mardutho’s Syriac language summer school as a Teaching Assistant in 2020. Hannah is also a member of the English Translation Review Committee of the Antioch Bible.

Joss Childs

Joss Childs

Hugoye Digital Humanities Editorial Assistant

Joss Childs is the Digital Humanities Editorial Assistant for Hugoye. She was the inaugural Dr. Nebil and Mrs. Jennifer Aydin Fellow in 2020. She earned her BA from Mount Holyoke College and is currently completing an MA at the University of Chicago.

Emily Chesley, MDiv

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 (2016) and the Fulbright Commission (2022-2023), 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.

Eva María Rodrigo Gómez, PhD

Eva María Rodrigo Gómez, PhD

Digital Humanities Fellow

Eva María Rodrigo Gómez obtained her PhD in Christian and Classical Literature in 2022, with a dissertation that prepared a critical edition and translation of two Christological memre of Narsai of Nisibis. She now continues to study East Syriac Exegesis, focusing on the Hexaemeral homilies of Emmanuel bar Shahhare. She has pursued her research in Spain, Italy, and Israel. At Beth Mardutho, Eva María is working on systematizing the abbreviations of authors and works, as well as on tokenization and lemmatization. 

Michael D. Ethington, MA

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

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.

Former Staff

Brandon Allen, MDiv

Brandon Allen, MDiv

Curator, 2016-2020

Sunil D. Persad, MBA

Sunil D. Persad, MBA

Operations Manager, 2018-2021

Michael Nashed, MA

Michael Nashed, MA

Visiting Fellow in Digital Humanities, 2022