Team
Dr. Agnieszka Brylak
ORCID Number: 0000-0002-5268-2248
Position in the project: Principal Investigator
Agnieszka Brylak is a cultural historian and a philologist dealing with pre-Hispanic and early-colonial Mesoamerican cultures and religions. Her research focuses particularly on the Nahuas (Aztecs) and their language, Nahuatl. She adopts an interdisciplinary approach, which places her work at the intersection of ethnohistory, cultural anthropology, philology, and religious studies. In recent years, her main interests evolved around performances, humor, laughter, and culture-contact phenomena. She is interested in exploring how Spanish (and more broadly, European) cultural heritage has influenced and biased Western understanding of pre-Hispanic reality since the early sixteenth century.
Prof. Danièle Dehouve
ORCID Number: 0000-0001-5696-3314
Position in the project: Colaborator
Danièle Dehouve is a French anthropologist and ethnohistorian, specializing in the Indigenous peoples of Mexico, particularly those from the state of Guerrero. She completed her undergraduate studies at the Sorbonne under the supervision of Georgette Soustelle, with a thesis titled: "Socioeconomic Changes in the Community of Xalpatlahuac, Mexico." She later earned a doctorate in Arts and Humanities with the thesis "Commodity Production and Social Organization in an Indigenous Province of Mexico (16th–20th Centuries)" from the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris, under the direction of Jacques Soustelle. She is a member of the Laboratory of Ethnology and Comparative Sociology at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). Among her most notable positions are Emeritus Research Director at CNRS and Emeritus Director at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE). Her fields of research have included contemporary political anthropology of Mexico, religious anthropology of Mesoamerican rituals, the history of colonization and evangelization in Mexico, and the ethnology of Indigenous peoples of Mexico. In the past ten years, she has focused on the social organization and religion of the Nahua peoples of pre-Hispanic central Mexico.
Dr. Bérénice Gaillemin
ORCID Number: 0009-0005-4245-2835
Position in the project: Postdoctoral Researcher
Dr. Bérénice Gaillemin is an anthropologist and art historian, with degrees from the École du Louvre and University of Paris Ouest Nanterre (Ph.D. in ethnology, 2013). For more than ten years she taught Classical Nahuatl at the University Paris 8th and at the INALCO. Her research focuses on different ways in which speech, images, and writing are articulated. She specializes in the study of colonial and contemporaneous tools—visual semiotic signs and texts—used to spread Catholicism in New Spain and in the Andes (pictorial catechisms, sermons in Nahuatl, Quechua doctrines). Between 2020 and 2023, she participated in the Florentine Codex Initiative (Getty Research Institute) focusing her research on the third (pictorial) narrative of the codex.
Dr. Julia Madajczak
ORCID Number: 0000-0002-6309-2243
Position in the project: Postdoctoral Researcher
Dr Julia Madajczak - an archeologist and ethnohistorian by training - is an expert in prehispanic and colonial Nahua culture and the Nahuatl language, which she has studied for the past 20 years. She has recently published articles on the Nahua religion and ritual in Ethnohistory and HAHR.
Prof. Katarzyna Mikulska
ORCID Number: 0000-0001-8551-5596
Position in the project: Senior Researcher
Prof. Dr. Katarzyna Mikulska is an expert in pre-Hispanic hemerological (divinatory) codices from the so-called Borgia Group. Her research interests, apart from these codices as such, are the gods and the concept of god of central Mesoamerican cultures, divinatory systems, the ways of encoding information in pre-Hispanic codices, and the theory of writing /graphic communication systems. She has worked with original pre-Hispanic codices in the Vatican Library and the National Library of France, among others. She is the author of two monographic books (one of them nominated in 2016 for the Kotarbiński Prize) and of ca. 40 articles and book chapters. She has also edited four volumes in international cooperation, two of them being the results of her two previous projects: one on the Graphic Communication System of pre-Hispanic central Mexico (2019) and the other on the Codex Vaticanus B (Vat. Lat. 3773). Presently, she is leading an international project on a pre-Hispanic codex, known as Ms. Aubin/Mexicain 20, preserved in the National Library of France.
Gabriela Piszczatowska
ORCID Number: 0009-0009-3276-5271
Position in the project: Predoctoral Researcher
Gabriela Piszczatowska is a PhD student at the Doctoral School of Humanities at the University of Warsaw. Her research focuses on the significance of fire and heat in the pre-Hispanic culture and religion of Central Mexico.
Dr. Katarzyna Szoblik
ORCID Number: 0000-0001-6269-2645
Position in the project: Postdoctoral Researcher
Dr Katarzyna Szoblik is an expert in Mesoamerican cultures, with her research focusing on the Nahuatl songs in the sixteenth-century manuscript Cantares mexicanos. From 2018 to 2022, she led a project project “Cultural topoi in the pre-Hispanic and early colonial oral tradition of Central Mexico” (2018-2022). Currently, she is collaborating with scholars from Mexico, the U.S., and Poland on the project "In the Tlalocan of Saint Francis" (2022-), exploring the syncretic and intercultural dimensions of Christian chants in Cantares mexicanos.
Katarzyna Wągrodzka-Villegas
ORCID Number: 0000-0002-3194-3787
Position in the project: Research Project Assistant
Katarzyna Wągrodzka is a PhD student in Culture and religion studies at the University of Warsaw, Poland. In her doctoral research, she studies Peruvian comics, conducting a dissertation project titled "Rewriting History in Peruvian Comics as a Possible Decolonizing Act." In 2024, she received a scholarship from the Excellence Initiative – Research University program, which funded her research stay at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru from March to July 2024. Within the ERC-funded TEOTL project, she supports the team in both research and promotional activities. She is responsible, among other things, for managing the TEOTL project's Facebook and Instagram pages, handling the project’s email account, and maintaining the website.