Authorial Fictions and Attributions in the Ancient Mediterranean III

This colloquium brings together scholars working on early Judaism, early Christianity, and Classics to discuss authorship and attribution beyond the typical boundaries of our fields. Monthly events through December will feature panel discussions of prominent work in this area, alongside new research presentations. Come join us to hear interdisciplinary dialogue on authorial fictions and attributions in the ancient Mediterranean, featuring top scholars in ancient history, as well as rising stars among early career researchers!

Stay tuned for further registration details for our final event on December 9!

Panel 1: Panellists Ben Wright, Eva Mroczek, Jamey Walters, and Tim Whitmarsh will discuss the essay: Benjamin G. Wright III and Eva Mroczek, “Ben Sira’s Pseudo-Pseudepigraphy: Idealizations from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages,” in Sirach and Its Contexts: The Pursuit of Wisdom and Human Flourishing, ed. Samuel Adams, Greg Schmidt Goering, and Matthew J. Goff, JSJSupp 196 (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 213-239.

Panel 2: Panellists Tom Geue, Candida Moss, and Sarah Rollens will discuss the book: Tom Geue, Author Unknown: The Power of Anonymity in Ancient Rome (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2019).

Panellists for Event 1

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Benjamin Wright has broad interests in the study of Early Judaism, focusing primarily on Wisdom literature, particularly the Wisdom of Ben Sira, and the Septuagint and ancient translations. His most recent book is a commentary on the Letter of Aristeas (de Gruyter, 2015). Lately he has written on notions of time in ancient Judaism, the use of the Apocrypha among Jews, and the application of globalization theory to ancient Judaism. He is currently working on a commentary on Ben Sira.

Eva Mroczek writes on early Jewish literary culture. She is the author of The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity and is finishing a book on ancient and modern manuscript discovery narratives. 

Jamey Walters is a scholar of late ancient Christianity in the Eastern Mediterranean world. In particular, he enjoys thinking about the translation and transmission of texts throughout the Christian East, the manuscripts that carried those texts, and the scribes who copied them.

Tim Whitmarsh is the author of numerous books and articles on aspects of ancient Greek literature, culture, thought, and religion, including Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (2015) and Dirty Love: The Genealogy of the Ancient Greek Novel (2018). He is general editor of the Oxford Classical Dictionary (5th edition).  He is currently editing a collected volume of translations of the Greek epic poets of the Roman Empire.

Panellists for Event 2

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Tom Geue teaches Latin literature at the University of St Andrews. He has written about Roman satire, anonymous Roman literature, and the repression and eruption of slavery in Virgil’s Georgics. He’s now at work on a book between intellectual history and classical scholarship, called Major Corrections: the Materialist Philology of Sebastiano Timpanaro, which seeks to understand what it means for technical philology and militant Marxism to work together towards a future of full human flourishing.

Candida Moss is a scholar of early Christianity who has published on martyrdom, disability, resurrected bodies, and antiquities trafficking. She is invested in communicating academic insights to a broader public and is currently working on a book on enslaved literate works and the New Testament.

Sarah Rollens’ work focuses on the social context and history of earliest Christianity. Her first book Framing Social Criticism in the Jesus Movement: The Ideological Project of the Sayings Gospel Q came out in 2014. She has published articles on the social history of Christianity, the synoptic problem, voluntary associations and Paul’s groups, theoretical issues in the study of Christian origins, among many other topics.