The Digital Future of Early Christian Studies: Utopian, Apocalyptic, and Apocryphal

The 2016-2017 Weltin Lecture in Early Christianity

Each day, it seems, brings news about an advance in our understanding of the ancient world using technology. We’ve 3D-printed the arch of Palmyra.  We’ve scanned the text inside the ancient carbonized scrolls of Herculaneum. Is the future of antiquity digital? And where is early Christianity in this new digital landscape of the ancient world? This lecture will present current digital research in early Christian studies as well as discuss the hopes, challenges, and even perils of such work.

Caroline T. Schroeder is a Professor of Religious Studies at The University of the Pacific. She is a historian of religion, focusing especially on Christianity in Late Antiquity. Prof. Schroeder is the author of Monastic Bodies (2007), a book on asceticism and monasticism in early Christian Egypt, and the co-editor of Melania: Early Christianity through the Life of One Family (2016), with Catherine M. Chin of University of California, Davis. Additionally, Schroeder is the author of several recent articles on topics as varied as digital humanities and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife fragment. Currently, she is the co-director of the digital humanities project Coptic Scriptorium and is completing a book about children and families in early Egyptian monasteries.

This lecture is free and open to the public. For more information please contact the Religious Studies Program at religiousstudies@wustl.edu or (314) 935-8677.