Matthias Egger completed his undergraduate studies in art history at the École du Louvre, before pursuing a master’s degree at the École Pratique des Hautes Études – PSL (EPHE) with a dissertation on manuscript Coptic 13 from the Bibliothèque nationale de France. He is currently a PhD candidate in art history at the EPHE under the supervision of Prof. Ioanna Rapti, with funding from the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA). His research focuses on a largely unexplored - and often unknown - corpus of illuminated Coptic biblical manuscripts produced in Lower Egypt between the medieval and modern periods. Through this study, he aims to highlight the coherence of these manuscripts over an extended historical timespan, and to re-evaluate the place of Coptic illumination, within a broader Oriental manuscript tradition.

Alongside his research, Matthias Egger undertook in 2023 a cataloguing mission of Coptic manuscripts held at the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale (IFAO) in Cairo. In 2024 and 2025, he contributed to the project Les Voyages des Thierry at the INHA and is currently participating in the research program Calligraphies in Arabic Script at the Frontiers of the Islamicate World  (CallFront).

Email: matthias.egger@etu.ephe.psl.eu