Mara Nicosia is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Literary Studies, and works within the ERC project Novel Echoes, promoted by Prof. Dr. Koen De Temmerman. She earned her B.A. in Oriental Languages at the University of Catania (2013) and her M.A. in Oriental Languages and Civilizations at the University of Naples "L'Orientale" (2015), where she earned as well her Ph.D. in 2020, under the supervision of Prof. Riccardo Contini. She spent the second year of her doctoral program at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) in Paris.
Her primary focus is the study of Semitic languages and the contacts between Greek and various types of Aramaic, particularly Syriac. For her Ph.D. thesis, she studied the technical vocabulary of Syriac rhetoric between the Greek world and the Arabic reinterpretation, and she created a trilingual comparative lexicon.
At Ghent University, she works on the reception of Greek novelistic tradition in the Near and Middle East, with a primary focus on the Syriac and Arabic worlds, and she is co-lecturer of the course "Ancient Rhetoric".
