Fabio Porzia

Fabio Porzia is an Associate Member at Patrimoine, Littérature, Histoire (PLH), a research unit affiliated with the University of Toulouse - Jean Jaurès. His academic work focuses on ancient history, archaeology, and religious studies, with particular emphasis on the ancient Levant and Mediterranean worlds.

Dr. Porzia holds a Master's degree in Biblical Sciences from the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome and a PhD in Ancient Sciences from the University of Toulouse - Jean Jaurès. His doctoral thesis, "Governing with the Book. A Certain Idea of Ancient Israel," supervised by Corinne Bonnet and Stefania Mazzoni, critically examined the concepts of "identity" and "ethnicity" in the study of ancient Israel. The thesis called for a complete revision of the identity approach to ancient Israel, supported by methodologies adequate to in fieri processes and modern anthropological sciences.

Porzia's research interests span ancient Israel studies, Levantine archaeology, epigraphy, religious studies (particularly ancient polytheism), identity and ethnicity in ancient contexts, Phoenician studies, and biblical studies. His work challenges traditional approaches to understanding ancient identities, advocating for methodologies more attuned to the fluid and dynamic nature of cultural formation in antiquity. He has made significant contributions to the study of divine names and epithets in the ancient Mediterranean, exploring how religious concepts traveled and transformed across cultural boundaries. His current research focuses on the wide spectrum of interactions existing between different communities of the southern Levant region.

His recent publications reveal a strong focus on digital approaches to ancient religious studies, particularly through the Mapping Ancient Polytheisms (MAP) project. This ERC Advanced Grant initiative represents a major interdisciplinary effort to create comprehensive digital resources for studying religious phenomena across the ancient Mediterranean world. His work bridges traditional philological and archaeological methods with innovative digital humanities approaches, creating new pathways for understanding religious continuity and change in antiquity.

Fabio Porzia serves as the responsible for the MAP project (Mapping Ancient Polytheisms), an ERC Advanced Grant project focused on epigraphic and literary sources in the Levant from the first millennium BC. This ambitious research program brings together scholars from multiple disciplines to create a comprehensive digital mapping of ancient religious phenomena, examining how divine names and epithets functioned as interfaces between religious systems and human agency across the Mediterranean world.