Professor, Religious Studies
Director, Medieval Studies Institute
Adjunct Associate Professor, History
Adjunct Faculty, Borns Jewish Studies Program
Adjunct Faculty, Classical Studies
Affiliate Faculty, Ancient Studies
Affiliate Faculty, Medieval Studies
I am an interdisciplinary scholar of culture, literature, religion, and philosophy in the Roman and Byzantine world. My research has covered a broad range: the politics of religious and ethnic identity; the practice and theory of translation; historiography; the history of books and reading; and most recently, the materiality of Byzantine manuscripts.
Byzantine Readers of Ecclesiastical History
Edition, translation, and study of the marginalia Laur. Plut. 70.7, the earliest manuscript of Eusebius’s and Socrates’s ecclesiastical histories.
Arethas of Caesarea
Arethas is well-known to classicists and Byzantinists as the owner of several of the most important extant manuscripts of Greek philosophy and early Christian literature, which also contain scholia curated by Arethas and his reader’s notes. Like so many Byzantine readers whose notes exist in manuscripts, he has tended to be written-off as offering little of value beyond his preservation of classical texts. In addition, nearly all treatments of Arethas have focused exclusively on his “classical” texts (e.g. Plato, Aristotle, Lucian) and ignored his codices of Christian texts. This holistic study will address his surviving letters and orations along with his extant books to offer a detailed, interdisciplinary study of this middle byzantine intellectual.
Socrates, Ecclesiastical History
(co-authors Rebecca Falcasantos and David Maldonado)
A new, fully annotated translation, the first in English based on a modern critical edition of the text.
Remembering Nicaea: The Ecclesiastical History of Ps.-Gelasius (CPG 6034) (co-authors Martin Shedd and Sean Tandy)
[forthcoming in SBL Writings from the Greco-Roman World]
The anonymous Ecclesiastical History ascribed to “Gelasius of Cyzicus” (CPG 6034) and dating to the late 5th century, is a 3-book account of Constantine the Great’s rise to sole rule, the Council of Nicaea, and the immediate aftermath of the Council. The work has never been translated into English, and has been the subject of only two dedicated studies, both in German. It has also been largely ignored in studies of the reception and memory of Nicaea, because it has usually been considered “merely” a pastiche of other, familiar texts, in particular, Eusebius of Caesarea’s Ecclesiastical History and Life of Constantine. In fact, the text is compiled from a variety of sources, and many of these are otherwise-unknown. In addition to offering the first complete English translation of this work, the volume will offer a comprehensive introduction which locates the work within its theological, literary, and socio-historical contexts, along with extensive explanatory and exegetical notes.
“Plotinus’ Portrait and Pamphilus’ Prison Notebook: Neoplatonic and Early Christian Textualties at the Turn of the Fourth Century C.E.,” Journal of Early Christian Studies, forthcoming Fall 2013.
“Textuality and Territorialization: Eusebius’ Exegeses of Isaiah, and Empire,” Eusebius and the Construction of a Christian Culture, Aaron Johnson and Jeremy Schott, eds. (Cambridge: Center for Hellenic Studies/Harvard University Press, 2013).
“Afterword: Receptions,” Eusebius and the Construction of a Christian Culture, Aaron Johnson and Jeremy Schott, eds. (Cambridge: Center for Hellenic Studies/Harvard University Press, 2013).
Prospective graduate students interested in the study of the Roman world, late antiquity, and early Christianity should check out the description of the AMNER area (Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Religions) on the Religious Studies website. Indiana has excellent resources for the study of late antiquity, and prospective students should also take a look at faculty in History, Art History, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and the Borns Jewish Studies Program.
Students interested in graduate study in early Christianity and religions of late antiquity should have a good undergraduate degree in a relevant field (e.g. Classics, Near Eastern Studies, Religious Studies, etc.) and good basic coursework in the history and culture of late antiquity and/or premodern Christianity. Students should also be prepared with intermediate reading ability in a relevant ancient language (e.g. Greek, Latin, Syriac), and preferably, at least elementary experience in a second. Reading knowledge of either French or German is strongly recommended as well.
The College of Arts