Successful kick-off workshop in Graz
From February 8 to 10, 2026, the project team met in person for the first time in Graz for an internal workshop. This joint meeting marked an important milestone in the collaboration between the teams from Leuven and Graz. It highlighted the significant benefits of a canonical discourse and laid the groundwork for the next phase of the project.
In the individual sessions, scholarly insights were combined with joint exegetical work. The project leaders, Prof. Dr. Katharina Pyschny and Prof. Dr. Veronika Burz-Tropper, opened the workshop with presentations on purity and impurity in the Old and New Testaments, thereby establishing an important conceptual foundation for further discussion. Doctoral candidates Matej Papić and Mads Hedegaard Kristensen presented the current status of their dissertation projects and offered new perspectives on the topic of self-reflexivity/inner life in the Old and New Testaments. Student assistants Christina Schneidl and Nynke van Birgelen enriched the workshop with engaging presentations on medicine in the Old Testament and resurrection in the New Testament, respectively.
The team looks forward to continuing this exchange and hosting an exploratory workshop as part of the EABS Annual Conference, which will take place in Leuven from July 20 to 23, 2026. There, scholars from the fields of Jewish Studies, the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, the New Testament, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Septuagint Studies will present papers that examine various anthropological perspectives, thereby further expanding the project’s interdisciplinary approach. In addition, the team is eagerly looking forward to the project’s official kick-off conference, which will take place in Graz from October 21–22, 2026. During this conference, researchers in Old and New Testament biblical studies will engage in a canonical discourse on seven key themes of the project: self-reflexivity/individuality; embodiment and emotions; mortality and resurrection; sexuality; (im)purity; human perfection and fallibility; healing / medicine / illness.
We look forward to exciting new perspectives and insights on questions of human existence in the Bible!
