Students of ancient esotericism with their ear to the ground will have heard about the new MagEIA project, which promises to be a doozy of a cross-cultural research-project into ancient magic. If you have not heard of it, there is some information below. Anyone with an interest in proposing a research-project in any aspect of ancient magic, writ very broadly, will want to consider tailoring it to their Fellowships programme.

Here is their blurb:

Fellowships: Centre for Advanced Studies MagEIA

With funding of the German Research Foundation (DFG), the University of Würzburg has set up “MagEIA: Magic between Entanglement, Interaction, and Analogy”, a new Centre for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences (DFG Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe).

The MagEIA Centre, which is led by research teams in Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Comparative Philology, and Egyptology, is dedicated to the comparative study of ‘magical’ text traditions in the ancient cultures of West Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean.

A core element of MagEIA is a Fellows Programme, which provides funding for colleagues at different career stages to join the MagEIA group in Würzburg for extended research stays (usually 6–12 months). The Fellows Programme is open to a wide range of disciplines and research designs.

Further information on the MagEIA Centre can be found at https://go.uniwue.de/mageia. For information on the Fellows Programme specifically go to https://go.uniwue.de/mageiafellowship.

MagEIA will start in November this year, and we are inviting colleagues interested in becoming a MagEIA Fellow in 2024 or any of the following years to contact us.