Successful PhD viva for Jacopo Marcon

Jacopo was awarded the first doctoral scholarship on the European Research Council-funded CATENA project in 2018, after receiving two degrees in Classics from the University of Udine in Italy. His topic was the Pseudo-Oecumenian catena on Romans, which appears to be the oldest type of catena commentary on the Pauline Epistles as well as the most abundantly attested.

His thesis examines the eighty-five surviving manuscripts of this work. Eight manuscripts were selected for a full digital transcription, representing different stages of this work (the 920 numbered scholia, the additional Corpus Extravagantium, and the Scholia Photiana taken from the ninth-century Patriarch of Constantinople). Jacopo explores the relationships between these manuscripts as well as with other types of catena on Romans. One of his findings is the existence of an abbreviated form of the Pseudo-Oecumenian catena on Romans in several manuscripts. The electronic data from his thesis will be made available to accompany the digital version of the thesis on the University of Birmingham eTheses repository.

Jacopo's supervisors were Professor Hugh Houghton, the principal investigator of the CATENA project, and Dr Catherine Smith. His examiners were Professor Christos Karakolis of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and Dr Karen Wenell from Birmingham.

During his time at Birmingham's Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing, Jacopo also collaborated on a new catalogue of Greek manuscripts in Birmingham and co-edited a volume of papers from the Twelfth Birmingham Colloquium on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament. He recently presented his research at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado.

Last autumn, Jacopo was appointed as a postdoctoral researcher at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften where he is currently working on a project studying Alexandrian and Antiochian biblical exegesis in Late Antiquity.