The Catholic University of America

Visiting Scholars 2011-2012

 

Scott Johnson
 
Scott Johnson received his D.Phil. in Classics from the University of Oxford in 2005. He is currently a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in Byzantine Greek at Georgetown University and Dumbarton Oaks. He has been a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows (2004–07), a Fellow in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks (2009–10), and a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress (2010–11). His current research project is entitled “All the World’s Knowledge: Geographical Thought in Late Antiquity and Byzantium,” which is designed to form the basis of his next book. He is the author of The Life and Miracles of Thekla: A Literary Study (Center for Hellenic Studies & Harvard University Press, 2006) as well as of numerous articles, including ones forthcoming in Dumbarton Oaks Papers 64 (2010) and the Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity (of which he is also editor). He edited Greek Literature in Late Antiquity: Dynamism, Didacticism, Classicism (Ashgate, 2006). In addition to articles on late antique literary history (Greek, Latin, and Syriac), he has published most recently "Reviving the Memory of the Apostles: Apocryphal Tradition and Travel Literature in Late Antiquity," in Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory (eds), Revival and Resurgence in Christian History (Boydell Press, 2008), pp. 1-26. His translation of the fifth-century Miracles of Thekla is part of a volume entitled Miracle Tales from Byzantium (with Alice-Mary Talbot), which is due out early in 2012 in the new Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (Harvard University Press).
 

 

Albrecht Diem

Albrecht Diem has been, since 2007, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Syracuse University. After studying in Düsseldorf, Tübingen and Utrecht, he gained his doctorate at the last university in 2000, his thesis being subsequently published as Das Monastische Experiment: Die Rolle der Keuschheit bei der Entstehung des westlichen Klosterwesens, Vita Regularis, 24 (Münster: LIT-Verlag, 2005). (His most recent consideration of the theme has appeared as “Das Ende des monastischen Experiments: Liebe, Beichte und Schweigen in der Regula cuiusdam ad virgines,” in Gert Melville and Anne Müller (eds), Female vita religiosa between Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages: Structures, Developments and Spatial Contexts (Münster: LIT-Verlag 2011), pp. 81-136.)

He went on to hold teaching and research posts at Groningen, Nijmegen, and finally Vienna (working there as a Research Fellow under Walter Pohl), as well as shorter-term fellowships In Vienna and Rome. He also produced a critical edition of the Regula cuiusdam ad virgines while studying for a Licentiate in Mediaeval Studies at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto. Most recently (2010-2011), he held a Friedrich Solmsen Fellowship at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Dr Diem continues to make his mark on the study of early western monasticism with an extensive series of papers, characteristic in their emphasis on the constant ‘reinvention’ of the monastic way of life (with an associated shifting in its sense of its own past). Crucial examples are:

  • “Vita, Regula, Sermo: Eine unbekannte lateinische Vita Pacomii als Lehrtext für ungebildete Mönche und als Traktat über das Sprechen,” in Richard Corradini, Max Diesenberger and Meta Niederkorn-Bruck (eds), Zwischen Niederschrift und Wiederschrift: Frühmittelalterliche Hagiographie und Historiographie im Spannungsfeld von Kompendienüberlieferung und Editionstechnik (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2010), pp. 223-72.
  • “Rewriting Benedict: The regula cuiusdam ad virgines and Intertextuality as Tool to Construct a Monastic Identity,” Journal of Medieval Latin 17 (2007): 313-28.
  • “Monks, Kings and the Transformation of Sanctity: Jonas of Bobbio and the End of the Holy Man,” in Speculum 82 (2007): 521-59.
  • “Was bedeutet Regula Columbani?,” in Max Diesenberger and Walter Pohl (eds), Integration und Herrschaft: Ethnische Identitäten und soziale Organisation im Frühmittelalter (Vienna, 2002), pp. 63-89.

One of his most recent essays, “Inventing the Holy Rule: Some Observations on the History of Monastic Normative Observance in the Early Medieval West,” in Hendrik Dey and Elizabeth Fentress (eds), Western Monasticism ante litteram: The Spaces of Monastic Observance in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 53-84, colors his visit to the Center, since he is here also to plan a chapter on early monastic rules in the West, which he is writing jointly with Philip Rousseau for the new two-volume History of Medieval Western Monasticism being planned by Cambridge University Press, under the joint editorship of Alison Beach (Köln) and Isabelle Cochelin (Toronto).

 

Yifat Monnickendam

Yifat Monnickendam is a Crane Post-Doctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in that university’s Jewish Studies Program (she specializes in the comparative study of Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Greek, and Latin sources in Late Antiquity).  After receiving a BA and MA from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, she completed her doctorate at Bar Ilan University.  She was awarded at that time the Rotenstreich Fellowship, one of the most prestigious awards granted by the Council of Higher Education to doctoral students in Israel.  Her dissertation was titled, “Halakhic Issues in the Writings of the Syriac Church Fathers Ephrem and Aphrahat.”  It focuses on matrimonial law as a test case for understanding the relations between Ephrem and Aphrahat and the surrounding society and culture.  It also answers questions regarding the origin of Syriac Christianity and its relations to contemporary and earlier Jewish, Christian, and pagan traditions and writings.  Her recent publications include, "'I Will Put to Death and Bring to Life, I Will Smite and Heal': Two Versions of the Polemic on the Resurrection of the Dead," Tarbiz: A Quarterly for Jewish Studies 76 (2008): 329-52.  Two articles are forthocming in Le Museon and Journal of Semitic Studies.  Dr Monnickendam intends to focus now on legal thought, as reflected in Syriac legal writings of the fifth and sixth centuries and contemporary Jewish and Christian literature.  She is planning a book with the tentative title, Marriage and Identity: Jewish Legal Traditions in Ephrem’s Writings.
 
 

 


Visiting Scholars 2010-2011

 
Megan Hale Williams
 
After completing bachelor's degrees in both Classics and Biology at Stanford University, Megan Williams completed a doctorate at Princeton University under Peter Brown.  She is the author of The Monk and the Book: Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship (Chicago, 2006) and (with Anthony Grafton) Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea (Harvard, 2006).  Significant recent papers include "Chromatius and Jerome on Matthew," in Pier Franco Beatrice and Alessio Peršic (eds), Chromatius of Aquileia and his Age (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 193-226.  While visiting the University, Dr Williams presided over a roundable discussion with graduate students working in the early Christian field, and over a lunchtime seminar devoted to the topic, "From Apologetic Historian of the Persecuted Church to Christian Imperial Panegyrist."   Dr Williams teaches in the Department of History, San Francisco State University.
 

 

AnneMarie Luijendijk

After specialist work on the New Testament at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, AnneMarie Luijendijk completed her doctorate at The Harvard Divinity School in 2005.She joined the Princeton faculty in 2006. Having won an American Fellowship from the American Association of University Women for the 2008-2009 academic year, she is now Melancthon W. Jacobus University Preceptor in Religion (2009-2012).

Her chief interest as a papyrologist is in the social history of early Christianity, using both literary texts and documentary sources. Her book Greetings in the Lord: Early Christians and the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (Harvard University Press, 2008) is the first book-length study of Christians in the ancient Egyptian city, where some of the most important and oldest fragments of early Christian books have been unearthed. Dr Luijendijk describes the different contexts and circumstances of Christian life. Creating an image of the city's marketplace, she first addresses questions of Christian identity in the public sphere. Then the focus shifts to Sotas, bishop of Oxyrhynchus in the third century, busy networking with other Christian communities through teaching, book production, and fund-raising. The third part is concerned with the evidence of persecution and the far-reaching power and pervasiveness of Roman bureaucracy. Christians in the city were forced to negotiate their identity by small acts of resistance. We are reminded overall how much our understanding of Christian life in the period rests on the mundane aspects of everyday life, which make papyri so fascinating.

Dr Luijendijk is currently working on two new books. One, provisionally entitled Forbidden Oracles, entails the publication of a sixth-century Coptic manuscript containing Christian oracular answers. The other is on Christian manuscripts more generally, the development of the New Testament canon, and material culture.  Her other recent publications include: “Papyri from the Great Persecution: Roman and Christian Perspectives,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 16 (2008): 341-69; "Sacred Scriptures as Trash: Biblical Papyri from Oxyrhynchus,” Vigiliae Christianae 64 (2010): 217-54; and “A New Testament Papyrus and its Documentary Context: An Early Christian Writing Exercise from the Archive of Leonides,” Journal of Biblical Literature 129 (2010): 597-613.
 

Previous Visiting Scholars

Yifat Monnickendam (Spring 2009).  Dr Monnickendam has returned to us as a Visiting Scholar during her tenure of a Crane Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore (see above).

Chrysi Kotsifou (2006-2008) gained her doctorate in 2002, after undergraduate and graduate research at Goldsmith’s and King’s Colleges, University of London.  She has held post-doctoral fellowships at CUA, Princeton, the American University in Cairo, and Columbia, and has taught at the American University in Cairo.  She was granted a two-year teaching and research fellowship in the Center, combined with an appointment as visiting associate curator in the Semitics/ICOR Library, supported by funds from the Center, the Institute of Christian Oriental Research, and the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences.  The Center is also grateful for the support of the late Professor Michael O’Connor.  In addition to graduate teaching, Dr Kotsifou worked on the preservation, cataloguing, and publication of some of the Coptic ostraca and papyri lodged in the ICOR library.  She is currently attached to the Department of Classics at Oxford University.

Karl Johan Skeidsvoll (2006-2007), Research Fellow at the University of Bergen, continued his research on Gregory of Nazianzus.

Caroline Schroeder (Spring 2006), at that time Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University.  She is currently Assistant Professor of Religious and Classical Studies at the University of the Pacific at Stockton, CA.  She published Monastic Bodies: Discipline and Salvation in Shenoute of Atripe (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), and received the 2010-2011 Graves Award for outstanding teaching in the humanities.  She is currently writing a monograph on children in late antique monastic environments.

Wendy Mayer (2005-2006), formerly Deputy Director of the Centre for Early Christian Studies at the Australian Catholic University, was a Queen Elizabeth II Research Fellow and a Research Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks.

Lewis Ayres (Spring 2005), at that time on the faculty of the Candler School of Theology, Emory University.  He is currently Bede Professor of Catholic Theology in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Durham.  Professor Ayres is a member of the International Editorial Board of our series "CUA Studies in Early Christianity."  He is author of Nicaea and Its Legacy (Oxford University Press, 2004) and of Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge University Press, 2010).