Fassa Eleni

I was born in Athens and studied at the University of Athens (undergraduate studies in the Department of Philology, specialization in Classical Philology; doctoral studies in the Department of History and Archaeology, field of History) and at the University of Exeter (MA in Ancient Drama and Society, Department of Classics and Ancient History). From 2017 to 2019, I served as Principal Investigator of the research project “The Gods of Egypt in Macedonia: Cultic Experience of Otherness and Strategies of Assimilation in the Greco-Roman Period”, based at the National Hellenic Research Foundation and funded by the IKY–ESPA program. Since 2023, I have been affiliated with the Center for Hellenic Studies at Harvard University, initially as a Research Fellow (project: Gods on the Move: Divine Mobility in Hellenistic and Roman Macedonia) and subsequently as a Research Associate.

My research focuses on the religious and cultural history of the Hellenistic and Roman East, from the late 4th century BCE to Late Antiquity. I am particularly interested in the establishment and development of the cults of Isis and other so-called “Oriental” deities in the Mediterranean, in the religious history of Macedonia, and in the processes by which gods perceived as “foreign” were integrated into the traditional Greek world. My research interests also include the modes of religious experience as a formative factor of cultic reality, as well as the formation of the spiritual communities in the Greco-Roman world. I have been publishing monographs and articles in international peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes (see attached detailed CV).