My Research
My publications include an article on constructions of gender and class in late antique pilgrimage (published in the Journal of Early Christian Studies and recipient of the 2018 JECS best first article award) and a translation of homilies by the sixth-century Syriac bishop, Jacob of Serugh. I have also contributed to several volumes, including essays exploring the social utility of a rhetoric of persecution, the intersection of mimetic theory and the rhetoric of disgust in the homilies of John Chrysostom, and constructions of Jerusalem in the Christian literary imagination from antiquity through the crusading period. Additionally, I am co-editing an edition of the John and Acts volume of the Biblia Americana, composed by the early American minister and scholar Cotton Mather.
In addition to this work, I have recently completed a monograph entitled Constantinople: Ritual, Violence, and Memory in the Making of a Christian Imperial Capital, forthcoming from the University of California Press (June, 2020). The book examines how traditional Roman cultural structures were used to transform Christianity into the imperial religion in Constantinople during the fourth and fifth centuries. When Constantine founded Constantinople in November 324 C.E., the new city accommodated both traditional patterns of religion (i.e., paganism) and Christianity in its various forms—Constantinople was in no way an identifiably Christian city. This situation created no small degree of tension and competition over the proper expression of civic religion. It was only over the following century and half that Christian bishops would come to progressively dominate the city’s religious frameworks, expelling non-Christians from the civic landscape and from the city’s historiographic tradition. I argue that communal engagement in the rituals of civic religion, in conjunction with the monopolization of civic space and institutional memory, provided a crucial mechanism for the production of a new Constantinopolitan religious (Christian) identity during the century following the foundation of the city.
My new project explores the production and consumption of ecclesiastical histories in the fifth century as part of a wider culture of religious violence. Focusing on the histories of Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret, the project studies the way the authors wove episodes of conflict, mutilation, and martyrdom into the history of what they saw as orthodox Christianity, along with the reception of their texts by later compilers and historians into the modern period. Of particular interest to me is the potential of these narratives to justify violence against religious outsides--those they identify as heretics, pagans, and Jews (including Christians they cast as Jews). Related to this project, I am part of a joint project to produce a new translation of Socrates's Ecclesiastical History, which was most recently translated into English at the end of the nineteenth century.
In addition to this work, I have recently completed a monograph entitled Constantinople: Ritual, Violence, and Memory in the Making of a Christian Imperial Capital, forthcoming from the University of California Press (June, 2020). The book examines how traditional Roman cultural structures were used to transform Christianity into the imperial religion in Constantinople during the fourth and fifth centuries. When Constantine founded Constantinople in November 324 C.E., the new city accommodated both traditional patterns of religion (i.e., paganism) and Christianity in its various forms—Constantinople was in no way an identifiably Christian city. This situation created no small degree of tension and competition over the proper expression of civic religion. It was only over the following century and half that Christian bishops would come to progressively dominate the city’s religious frameworks, expelling non-Christians from the civic landscape and from the city’s historiographic tradition. I argue that communal engagement in the rituals of civic religion, in conjunction with the monopolization of civic space and institutional memory, provided a crucial mechanism for the production of a new Constantinopolitan religious (Christian) identity during the century following the foundation of the city.
My new project explores the production and consumption of ecclesiastical histories in the fifth century as part of a wider culture of religious violence. Focusing on the histories of Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret, the project studies the way the authors wove episodes of conflict, mutilation, and martyrdom into the history of what they saw as orthodox Christianity, along with the reception of their texts by later compilers and historians into the modern period. Of particular interest to me is the potential of these narratives to justify violence against religious outsides--those they identify as heretics, pagans, and Jews (including Christians they cast as Jews). Related to this project, I am part of a joint project to produce a new translation of Socrates's Ecclesiastical History, which was most recently translated into English at the end of the nineteenth century.