Kristina Sessa: Materiality and Religion in Late Antiquity

The workshop brings together four scholars: an archaeologist along with three cultural historians from the fields of Classics, Religious Studies, and History, who have hitherto worked primarily with literary sources, but who have projects that investigate the relationship between materiality and immateriality.  The workshop will begin with a thirty-minute collective discussion of an essay by the sociologist Andrew Pickering, “Material Culture and the Dance of Agency” (2010). Thereafter, each scholar will present a 20-25 minute paper on a specific subject.  These papers will serve as case studies through which to further explore the larger methodological issue of patristic studies and the material turn.