Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Tuesday, October 17, 2017 in Conferences, Divinity School, Events, HART, Lectures, News, Vanderbilt University, VRC.

Stephen J. Davis, professor of religious studies and Near Eastern languages and civilization at Yale University, will deliver the keynote lecture, “The Archaeology of Early Christian Monasticism: Evidentiary Problems and Criteria” on Thursday, October 19, at 4:10 pm in Cohen Hall 203 followed by a reception.  Davis will open ReLACS 2017, an interdisciplinary workshop on the study of Late Antiquity, with a reassessment of what we know—and how we know what we know—about the archaeological evidence for Christian monasticism in the first millennium CE.  Assessing the current state of the field, he will first address problems we face in both the identification and the dating of “monastic” sites and then discuss criteria by which we can engage more critically with the material evidence available to us.

Since 2006 Davis has served as executive director of the Yale Monastic Archaeology Project (YMAP), conducting field work and training graduate students primarily at three sites in Egypt—the Monastery of John the Little in the north; the White Monastery and its federated women’s monastery at Atripe in the south. In 2013 he initiated a related project to catalog the major collection of Coptic and Arabic manuscripts at the Monastery of the Syrians in Wadi al-Natrun, Egypt. Most recently, he has written Monasticism: A Very Short Introduction for Oxford University Press (forthcoming in January 2018), and has founded a new book series called Christian Arabic Texts in Translation (CATT) with Fordham University Press. His research projects include the preparation of a collaborative volume on the YMAP excavations of a monastic residence at John the Little (entitled Dwelling in the Desert), as well as publications related to his team’s ongoing archaeological work at a women’s monastery at Atripe in Upper Egypt.

The workshop also features presentations of work 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. The steering committee that organized ReLACS 2017 includes three Vanderbilt professors, who are also workshop participants:  David Michelson, assistant professor of the history of Christianity and history; Joe Rife, associate professor of classical and Mediterranean studies and founding program director, and Betsey Robinson, associate professor of history of art..

The ReLACS 2017 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.

The workshop is free and open to all VU faculty and students. The Thursday keynote lecture will be located in Cohen 203—all other events on Friday will be located 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.

*Photograph of Stephen J. Davis; and photograph showing conservation of a severely threatened early medieval wall painting of the Virgin and Child in the White Monastery Church, March 2015, by Alberto Sucato.