Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Eric Gottlieb ’25 is an undergraduate concentrating in History, Egyptology and Assyriology, and Applied Mathematics. Broadly speaking, he is interested in ancient religious transformation. His thesis, titled “Egyptian Christianization from the Manichaean Perspective: Evidence from Medinet Madi, 300–599 CE,” attempts to excavate lived experience by reading for the “hidden transcript” embedded in Medinet Madi’s extant textual record. Joining a growing corpus of archaeological and exegetical scholarship on the “quotidian turn,” his thesis draws from an array of postcolonial, sociological, and poststructural theory, in order to understand what it meant to be a “Manichaean” in Medinet Madi. Ultimately, he hopes the project will complicate the prevailing theory of Late Antique Egyptian Christianization by introducing new Manichaean evidence from Medinet Madi, and new “bottom up” methods of approaching that evidence. His other academic interests include Coptic philology, Middle Egyptian epigraphy, and apocryphal exegesis. Outside of school, he is involved in fair housing advocacy and policy analysis.