BA, MA, PhD
Lisa is a senior lecturer and research co-ordinator at St Athanasius College (SAC). Prior to her current position, she held various corporate positions in Business Marketing in Australia, the UK, and the UAE.
Lisa has a Masters degree in Egyptology and a Masters in Coptic Studies (both from Macquarie University, Sydney Australia), and a Ph.D. from Macquarie University and from the University of Göttingen, Germany. Her areas of interest include Coptic Studies, Early Egyptian Monasticism, Archaeology, and Christian-Arabic Studies.
Her publications to date have focused on the areas of Early Egyptian Monasticism and Hagiography. Her latest monograph is The Arabic Life of Antony Attributed to Serapion of Thmuis: Cultural Memory Reinterpreted (Brill, 2018), and Copts in Modernity (eds. Lisa Agaiby, Mark N. Swanson, Nelly Van Doorn-Harder (Brill, 2021), with Door to the Wilderness: The Greek, Coptic and Arabic Sayings of Antony the Great (co-author with Tim Vivian) forthcoming.
Lisa is currently leading a pioneering project to digitise and catalogue the entire collection of over 1,200 Coptic and Arabic manuscripts at the ancient Monastery of St Paul the Hermit at the Red Sea, Egypt. The Manuscript Project at St Paul’s Monastery in Egypt, not only serves an academic purpose, but also a fundamental service aspect: for centuries the manuscripts have been housed in the monastery’s fortress that lacks the conditions necessary for their preservation and as a result many of the manuscripts are damaged by moisture and insects. Thus the project to digitise their entire collection was primarily proposed for the benefit of the Monastery to eliminate the real threat of the manuscripts from further damage and thus preserve them for future generations.
At St Athanasius College, Lisa teaches the following units: ‘Uncovering the Past: an Archaeology of Christian Egypt’; ‘Saints and Sinners: Women in Late Antiquity’; ‘Hagiography and the Cult of the Saints’; ‘The Lives and Times of the Desert Fathers’; ‘Ascetic Theology and the Making of a Monk in Late Antiquity’.
Accredited teaching disciplines
Research areas
Positions
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Research Co-ordinator
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Senior Lecturer
External Affiliations
- Bulletin de la Société d'Archéologie Copte (Editorial Board)
- International Association for Coptic Studies (IACS) (Member)
- St Shenouda the Archimandrite Coptic Society (Member)