Florentina Badalanova Geller

Prof. Dr. Florentina Badalanova Geller is a leading scholar in Slavonic apocrypha and Byzantine studies, affiliated with the Topoi Collaborative Research Center (SFB) in Berlin. She spearheaded research in the “Spread of Knowledge” group (E-CSG-III) and the “Immaterial Causes and Physical Space” project (D-4-1), examining how parascriptural traditions shaped landscape perception and cosmological understanding within the Byzantine Commonwealth and Slavia Orthodoxa.

Her research centers on the intersection of apocryphal literature, historical geography, and linguistic transmission, with particular focus on Slavonic receptions of Enochic texts, folk Islam in the Balkans, and multilingual dynamics in sacred writings. She investigates how “blasphemous rustic scriptures” and oral traditions influenced religious cosmography, revealing complex interactions between canonical and parascriptural narratives in medieval Slavic contexts.

Analysis of her publications (2008-2014) shows a cohesive exploration of cosmological frameworks in apocryphal works, especially the Slavonic Apocalypse of Enoch, alongside studies of vernacular Qur’an translations and gendered readings of Genesis. Her methodology bridges philological rigor with cultural geography and history of science to decode “productive errors” in ancient knowledge systems.

Prof. Badalanova Geller has organized pivotal academic forums including the “Enochic Chronotope” conference (2013), “Knowledge to Die For” (2011), and lecture series on mythographies of scripts (2018) and Judeo-Christian encounters (2016-2017). These initiatives foster international collaboration on esoteric knowledge transmission, calendrical systems in 2 Enoch, and the intertextuality of Slavonic biblical commentaries.