This summer, I worked with Prof. Heidi Wendt from the School of Religious Studies and Department of History and Classical Studies on a project which examines Christian literary production in the context of intellectual culture in the 2nd century under the Roman Empire and in particular, its reliance on material textual technology. Her interests and research questions are far reaching, for they place theological questions about the formation of doctrine and the emergence of the early Christian church alongside ancient, secular philosophies, genres, and scholarly practices. In my initial meetings with Prof. Wendt, together, we narrowed our focus for the ARIA project onto the genre of miscellany, the Latin author Aulus Gellius, and ancient libraries. I began to read scholarship theorizing miscellany (Fitzgerald, Variety: The Life of a Roman Concept) and contextualizing the form in Christian thought (Heath, Clement of Alexandria and the Shaping of Christian Literary Practice : Miscellany and the Transformation of Greco-Roman Writing) as well as more broadly about Roman book culture (Johnson and Parker, Ancient Literacies : The Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome). At the same time, Prof. Wendt and I met with Dr. Kristen Howard, the liaison library for the Department of History and Classical Studies, who provided excellent insight not only for my ARIA project, but also for longer research projects I may pursue in the future, like a PhD. I worked on putting together a digital database of secondary sources for Prof. Wendt during the month of May, and I revisited this database in August when I began to collect materials for Prof. Wendt to review in her research.
In June and July, I primarily worked with Aulus Gellius’ Attic Nights. While reading, I drafted another database of citations and summaries, tagging each entry from a list of themes pertinent to Prof. Wendt’s research project: Book as Commodity, Materiality of the Text, Intellectual Culture, Miscellany as Genre, Slaves and Freedman, and Epistolary Communication. It was very exciting to work with primary material as well as to discover how to use the application Notion to organize data systematically and creatively—a method I will definitely revisit in my future studies. Simultaneously, I worked through Howley’s comprehensive study of the Attic Nights, Aulus Gellius and Roman Reading Culture : Text, Presence, and Imperial Knowledge in the Noctes Atticae, to gain more understanding of current scholarship on the author, his miscellany, and his scholarly practice.
I was very excited to work with Prof. Wendt on her project through ARIA. Because I had really enjoyed taking Ancient Greek with her last fall, a seminar focused on Lucian of Samosata, I not only shared her interest in Roman imperial intellectual culture, the market for religious expertise, and the role of books therein, but I admired her as a scholar and wanted to learn from her example. I would like to go to graduate school in Classics and potentially pursue a PhD, so the research practices I gained through this project were invaluable to me. At each stage, I learned how to collect and organize data much more systematically. I also gained appreciate for the broad scope an academic book project requires; even deep diving into one ancient author, Aulus Gellius, was enough to fill a summer. It was challenging to persist through his lengthy essays, spanning twenty books, most of whose relevancy it was difficult to assess. I wanted to include anything that would contribute to Prof. Wendt’s project, but still sort through the material so that she herself wouldn’t have to work through an overwhelming amount of material. Further, the project gave me the time and space to deepen my knowledge about Roman book culture and current scholarly debates. Prof. Wendt has encouraged me to develop my skills in literary analysis to purview genre more expansively, how it emerges and changes over time, and this project helped me explore how other, very sharp academics have done so (Howley and Fitzgerald are just two examples).
I would like to thank Mr. Neal Merker and Ms. Anna Stein for their donations and for making it possible for me to do research for pay this summer. In the Arts and Humanities, these opportunities are unfortunately rare, but integral not only for young students looking to build an academic career but also for making the field more equitable and more accessible. In Classics, this is especially true. I know the skills, knowledge, and relationship I developed with Prof. Wendt will be critical for shaping me as a scholar and my academic ambitions, and I know that this would not have been possible without my donors’ generosity.
