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Previous LASRG Readings

2022-2023

  • Yuliya Minets, The Slow Fall of Babel: Languages and Identities in Late Antique Christianity (Cambridge University Press, 2021)
  • Kyle Smith, Cult of the Dead: A Brief History of Christianity (University of California, 2022)
  • Julia Kelto Lillis, Virgin Territory: Configuring Female Virginity in Early Christianity (University of California Press, 2022).
  • Stephen Shoemaker, Creating the Qur’an: A Historical Critical Study (University of California Press, 2022)

2021-2022

  • Blossom Stefaniw, “Feminist Historiography and Uses of the Past,” Studies in Late Antiquity 4.3 (2020): 260-83
  • Nicola Denzey Lewis, The Early Modern Invention of Late Antique Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
  • Kate Cooper and Jamie Wood, eds., Social Control in Late Antiquity: The Violence of Small Words (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
  • Mattias P. Gassman, Worshippers of the Gods: Debating Paganism in the Fourth-Century Roman West (Oxford University Press, 2020)
  • Mary K. Farag, What Makes a Church Sacred: Legal and Ritual Perspectives from Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 2021)
  • Michel Foucault, Confessions of the Flesh, trans. Robert Hurley (Pantheon Books, 2021)

2020-2021

  • Christoph Markschies, God’s Body: Jewish, Christian, and Pagan Images of God, trans. Alexander Johannes Edmonds (Baylor University Press, 2019 [German original, 2016])
  • Maia Kotrosits, The Lives of Objects: Material Culture, Experience, and the Real in the History of Early Christianity (University of Chicago Press, 2020)
  • Jeffrey Wickes, Bible and Poetry in Late Antique Mesopotamia: Ephrem’s Hymns on Faith (University of California Press, 2019).
  • Maria Doerfler, Jephthah’s Daughter, Sarah’s Son: The Death of Children in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 2020).
  • Adi Ophir & Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Goy: Israel’s Others and the Birth of the Gentile (Oxford University Press, 2018)
  • Maijastina Kahlos, Religious Dissent in Late Antiquity, 350-450 (Oxford University Press, 2019).

2019-2020

  • Jennifer Barry, Bishops in Flight: Exile and Displacement in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 2019)
  • Rebecca Falcasantos, “A School for the Soul: John Chrysostom on Mimēsis and the Force of Ritual Habit,” in The Garb of Being: Embodiment and the Pursuit of Holiness in Late Ancient Christianity, ed. Frank, Holman, & Jacobs (Fordham University Press, 2019)

2018-2019

  • Jack Tannous, The Making of the Medieval Middle East (Princeton University Press, 2018)
  • Blossom Stefaniw, Christian Reading: Language, Ethics, and the Order of Things (University of California Press, 2019)
  • Ellen Muehlberger, Moment of Reckoning: Imagined Death and its Consequences in Late Ancient Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2019)

2017-2018

2016-2017

  • September 15 – Andrew S. Jacobs’ Epiphanius of Cyprus: A Cultural Biography of Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 2016).
  • October 26 – Kyle Smith’s Constantine and the Captive Christians of Persia (University of California Press, 2016).
  • December 6 – Julia Hillner’s Prison, Punishment and Penance in Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
  • January 25 – Todd S. Berzon’s Classifying Christians: Ethnography, Heresiology, and the Limits of Knowledge in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 2016).
  • February 20 – Heidi Wendt’s At the Temple Gates: The Religion of Freelance Experts in the Roman Empire (Oxford Press, 2016).
  • March 21 – Rachel Neis’s The Sense of Sight in Rabbinic Culture: Jewish Ways of Seeing in Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

2015-2016

  • September 24 – Essays from the recent collection edited by Catherine M. Chin and Moulie Vidas Late Ancient Knowing: Explorations in Intellectual History (University of California Press, 2015).
  • October 26 –  Select chapters from Michael Philip Penn’s Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians and the Early Muslim World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
  • November 12 – Select chapters from Dayna Kalleres’ City of Demons: Violence, Ritual, and Christian Power in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 2015).
  • January 20 – Select chapters from Chris L. de Wet’s Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity (University of California Press, 2015).
  • February 22 – Select chapters from Scott Fitzgerald Johnson’s Literary Territories: Cartographical Thinking in Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2016).
  • March 30 – Select chapters from Heidi Marx-Wolf’s new work Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority: Plutonists, Priests, and Gnostics in Third Century CE (University of Penn Press, 2016).
  • April 13 – Essays from a collection edited by C. Laes, K. Mustakallio and V. Vuolanto Children and Family in Late Antiquity: Life, Death, and Interaction (Peeters, 2015).