My name is Vevian Zaki, and I’m a researcher of Eastern Christianity, Christian Arabic texts, and manuscript culture. Over the years, I have developed a deep passion for manuscripts—not only for their main texts but especially for the paratextual materials that accompany them, particularly marginal annotations. Margins of manuscripts are open spaces where people, whether elite, ordinary, or poor, left their marks. In these margins, they recorded prayers, endowments, births and deaths, historical events, and at times even deeply personal thoughts, reflections, and emotions.
The Margins speak blog grew out of my fascination with these marginal notes. Here, I uncover and reconstruct stories from the edges of manuscripts. Through brief notes, comments, and annotations, it becomes possible to trace fragments of the social, cultural, and religious histories of people who lived centuries ago.
The aim of this blog is to make manuscript margins accessible to wider audiences. It gathers the few lines left by scribes, binders, owners, travellers, and readers, shaping them into narratives that survive only in the margins. From these traces, I piece together narratives, short or long, and share them. Some stories remain incomplete because only a few lines have endured. Others can be extended with careful imagination, while a few offer a fuller picture. Many notes were written anonymously; others bear the names of individuals—some well known, others known only from the few words they left behind.
My academic path has taken me through Egypt, Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom, where I have studied and worked on theology, Biblical Studies, and the history of Eastern Christianity. I completed my PhD in history and culture of the Near and Middle East at Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, focusing on the transmission history of the translations of the Pauline Epistles into Arabic.
Currently, I am a Marie Skłodowska–Curie Fellow at LMU Munich, working on my project Travellers on the Margins. In this project, I trace the stories of Eastern Christian travellers who passed through St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, Egypt, by studying the notes they left in the monastery’s manuscript colletions.
Dear reader, I invite you to follow and listen with me to what happens when the margins begin to speak.
Details
Dr. Vevian Zaki
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow
Orchid ID: 0000-0002-5211-390X
Follow my research here
E-Mail
vevianfarok@gmail.com
v.zaki@lmu.de
Address
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität
Institut für den Nahen und Mittleren Osten
Veterinärstr. 1
80539 München
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