Prof. Nicola Aravecchia will be on pre-tenure leave during the 2020/2021 academic year. He was recently awarded a Research Fellowship from Dumbarton Oaks, a Harvard University research institute in Washington DC. Prof. Aravecchia will be at Dumbarton Oaks from January until May, 2021.
Before going to Washington, DC, Nicola will spend the 2020 Fall semester in Australia, first as a visiting researcher at the Centre for Classical and Near Eastern Studies of Australia at the University of Sydney, then at the Department of Ancient History at Macquarie University (also in Sydney).
Prof. Aravecchia plans to spend his leave working on a new book project, entitled Early Christianity in Egypt’s Western Desert: The Fourth-Century Church at Amheida. The volume will be an archaeological, historical, and art historical study of a remarkable fourth-century basilica-church that his team excavated, in 2012–2013, at the Greco-Roman city of Trimithis/Amheida, located in the Dakhla Oasis of Egypt’s Western Desert. This project follows the 2018 publication of the final report of Nicola's excavations at the Egyptian site of 'Ain el-Gedida (https://nyupress.org/
