Department of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies 2023-2024 Lecture Series (co-sponsored by the Religious Studies minor)

The next lecture in our series features Heidi Wendt, associate professor of religions of the Greco-Roman world with a joint appointment with the Departments of History and Classical Studies at McGill University.

This lecture proposes a novel, working hypothesis of the socio-material conditions driving early Christian collecting, compositional, and interpretive habits in the latter part of the second century. Integrating recent scholarship that considers Pauline influence on the Gospels with work in classics on the editorial and authorial logics of collections and miscellany, it situates the textual practices of so-called Christian intellectuals within the broader literary and agonistic intellectual scene of imperial Rome.

Heidi Wendt (Ph.D., Brown University) is an associate professor of religions of the Greco-Roman World with a joint appointment with the Departments of History and Classical Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Québec. Her research investigates religious developments of the Roman imperial period, with a focus on situating Jewish and Christian actors and phenomena in their Greco-Roman milieu. Her first monograph, At the Temple Gates: The Religion of Freelance Experts in the Roman Empire (Oxford 2016) examines evidence for the rise of self-authorized experts in specialized religious skills, rites, and wisdom under the Roman Empire.