A paper delivered at in the 2017 Colloquia of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Considers how a group of sarcophagi from the Jewish catacombs of Rome reflect on the subject of Jewish art and Jewish patrons in Late Antiquity.

What did it mean to ‘be Jewish’ in the Greco-Roman world? Jews, Greeks and Romans will explore the myriad ways that Jewish communities across the Mediterranean engaged with Greco-Roman culture and constructed their own ways of being Jewish. Using texts, artifacts and images–from rabbinic commentaries to Roman catacombs–we will investigate…[Read more]

Front-matter and conclusions to my Ph.D. Dissertation (2017). The project considers nearly 200 sarcophagi from the late ancient necropoleis of Jewish communities at Beth She’arim and Rome. This corpus captures a wide range of the possibilities open to Jewish patrons as they went about acquiring or commissioning a sarcophagus and sculptural…[Read more]

Fakes, Forgeries, and Fictions examines the possible motivations behind the production of apocryphal Christian texts. Did the authors of Christian apocrypha intend to deceive others about the true origins of their writings? Did they do so in a way that is distinctly different from New Testament scriptural writings? What would phrases like…[Read more]

“Forbidden Texts on the Western Frontier: The Christian Apocrypha from North American Perspectives” features papers presented at the second York Christian Apocrypha Symposium held in September 2013 at York University in Toronto, Canada. The papers focus on what makes North American Christian Apocrypha scholarship unique, on what has come to def…[Read more]

In 1958, American historian of religion Morton Smith made an astounding discovery in the Mar Saba monastery in Jerusalem. Copied into the back of a seventeenth-century book was a lost letter attributed to Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150-215 CE) that contained excerpts from a longer version of the Gospel of Mark written by Mark himself and…[Read more]

This article investigates the ecloga of passages on death collected from works attributed to John Chrysostom and preserved in New College Manuscript 83, which is classified as CPG 4886. It describes New College Manuscript 83, the contents of its ecloga on death, and provides a direct comparison of this ecloga with another on death published in…[Read more]

Emphasizing the peculiar, the perverse, the clandestine and the scandalous, this volume opens up a critical discourse on sexuality and visual culture in early modern Italy. Contributors consider not just painted (conventional) representations of sexual activities and eroticized bodies, but also images from print media, drawings, sculpted objects…[Read more]

Questo volume propone un discorso critico sulla sessualità e sulla cultura visiva dell’Italia rinascimentale. I saggi raccolti tentano di fare luce su una serie di zone d’ombra, dando spazio a tutte quelle pratiche o preferenze considerate in genere come alternative o anomalie, e a un’ampia varietà di scenari “scandalosi”. Particolare attenzione…[Read more]

The lines between death and life were neither fixed nor finite to the peoples of the ancient Mediterranean. For most, death was a passageway into a new and uncertain existence. The dead were not so much extinguished as understood to be elsewhere, and many perceived the deceased to continue to exercise agency among the living. Even for those more…[Read more]

In the turmoil around the turn of the fifth century, controversy over the legacy of Origen took center stage, and questions regarding the nature of the resurrection were among the main points of contention. What was the nature of the resurrection body? In what sense will post-resurrection life represent a continuation or a break with the present…[Read more]

A sense of an ending dominates accounts of African Christianity after the Vandal conquest of the 430s, not least as a result of the apparent disappearance of the Donatists in an Africa now ruled by Homoian Christians. In fact, the transfer from Donatist schism to new ‘Arian controversy’ more closely resembles the broader picture of Vandal Afr…[Read more]

The rush of activity among London’s auction houses in the first few weeks of summer has long been a familiar occurrence that persists even today. However, this intense seasonal concentration of sales was not always so. This paper draws on quantitative methods to explore the gradual emergence of a tightly scheduled auction season in London at the t…[Read more]

The aim of this paper is to explore and call into question the account of the insurrection of a number of Germanic tribes against the Huns, in the so called Battle of Nedao River (second half of the fifth century). The testimony of this battle, recorded by Jordanes, represents the end of the submission of many Germanic and nomadic groups and the…[Read more]

Article (in Greek) on the historiography of Early Byzantine urbanism and the example of Messene, an important Roman city in the Peloponnese that changes radically during the Early Byzantine and Byzantine Early Medieval period.

List of “Gospel Thrillers” as part of work in progress