Event

Recent scholarship on the Mediterranean world in the first millennium has destabilized the methodological and theoretical assumptions that undergird traditional disciplinary boundaries between Early Christian Studies, Classics, and Religious Studies; textual and material studies; Roman, Byzantine, and other imperial regimes; or “Eastern” and “Western” provincial histories. Church fathers like Tertullian and Augustine have been a fruitful site of production for these interdisciplinary efforts, but such a lens risks re-inscribing a “great man of history” paradigm. For 2018-19, PSCO hopes to invite fresh conversation from the intersection of these fields of study centered by a geographic focus on the region, peoples, and histories of North Africa. What happens when we bring together archaeological, textual, and theoretical data in new configurations? What local continuities can be traced among political, religious, and economic changes? How might such a perspective affect our understanding of empire, periphery/center, and the history of Christianity beyond elite Latin discourses?