Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Thursday, October 19, 2017 in Conferences, Divinity School, Events, HART, Lectures, News, VRC.

The hinterland of Alexandria was the setting for some of the earliest and most important monastic settlements in late antique Egypt. It is this area that produced the famous “sayings of the desert fathers,” and it is in this area, above all, that Christian pilgrims from the Roman Empire encountered Egyptian monasticism. This is the only area of late antique Egypt where monks may be said to have truly turned the desert into a city.

Betsey Robinson, associate professor of history of art, will moderate a workshop session entitled “The Western Delta in Late Antiquity:  Archaeology and History” that will be presented by Ariel Lopez, Rhodes College,  at 9:15 a.m. on Friday, October 20, in the Divinity School Reading Room.  The session is part of ReLACS 2017, a two-day interdisciplinary workshop on the study of Late Antiquity that features presentations by scholars working in the fields of history, classics, religious studies, law, Jewish studies, Islamic studies, art history, gender studies, archaeology, digital humanities, and literature.

Free and open to the public, the Thursday (October 19) keynote lecture (Stephen J. Davis, “The Archaeology of Early Christian Monasticism: Evidentiary Problems and Criteria”) is at 4:10 pm in Cohen 203. All other events on Friday, October 20, will be held in the Divinity School Reading Room and at the Center for Digital Humanities.  For more information regarding the full schedule, go to https://divinity.vanderbilt.edu/news/relacs2017.php.

The workshop is sponsored by the Program in Classical and Mediterranean Studies and the Divinity School. Additional sponsorship has been provided by the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Religious Studies, The Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, the Department of History, the Department of History of Art, the Program in Jewish Studies, and the Vanderbilt Center for Digital Humanities.