An Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Research Seminar
2010-2012
This is a collaborative research seminar consisting
of fellows working on cross-culturally mapping death journeys and religious
preparations for them in order to investigate the relationship between the
anticipated afterlife journey and the group’s metaphysics and praxis. The fellows will be engaged in the creation
and cultivation of a rich interdisciplinary approach to the comparative study
of traditions, a ‘new’ history-of-traditions approach that is conscious of the
historical contexture of traditions, their referentiality, confluence, communal
generation and conveyance, responsiveness, changeability, accumulative nature,
and variability in transmission. Members
will be working on individual research projects related to the seminar’s
mission and their dissertations.
OUR SPONSORS
We would like to thank our sponsors, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Humanities Research Center at Rice University for their generous support.
EVENTS
Check back for the 2011-2012 schedule of events.
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Seminar Fellows
Bottom row, left to right: Adriana Umana, April DeConick (faculty leader), Michael Domeracki
Top row, left to right: Matthew Dillon, Grant Adamson, Franklin Trammell, Rebecca Gimbel
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| April D. DeConick
Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor of Biblical Studies.
She is a historian of early Jewish and Christian thought. What
fascinates her is mapping the many ways that the Jesus tradition emerges
across the literature, traditions that have left behind echoes of
bitter controversies and competing memories. She has a deep love for
exploring the various expressions of ante-Nicene mysticism, including
the spirituality of classic Gnostic thinkers. Her work has been called
"revisionist," challenging us to seek answers beyond the conventional.
Seminar Project: To write a set of academic articles that will form the foundation for my book, The Ancient New Age.
The book will introduce students and no-specialists to the wide range
of ancient Gnostic groups, practices, and metaphysics. I will argue that
the Gnostic communities were secret initiatory societies whose
metaphysics is tied intimately to the human's preparation for death and
the afterlife journey. I plan to investigate as many groups as possible,
beginning with the Ophians and the Naassenes.
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| Franklin Trammell
Fourth-Fifth year PhD student at Rice University. He has recently
published "The God of Jerusalem as the Pole Dragon: The Conceptual
Background of the Cosmic Axis in James." Pages 337-49 in The Codex Judas
Papers: Proceedings of the International Congress on the Tchacos Codex
held at Rice University, Houston, Texas, March 13-16, 2008. Edited by
April D. DeConick. NHMS 71. Leiden, Boston: E.J. Brill, 2009. His areas
of study include early Judaism and Christian origins, medieval Jewish
mysticism, along with ancient biblical and "gnostic" mythology. He is
writing a dissertation on esoteric currents in early Christianity, with a
particular emphasis on the Shepherd of Hermas.
In the seminar, Mr. Trammell is writing a chapter of his dissertation, focusing on ascension and the theme of building.
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| Adriana Umana
Hossman
A Fourth-Fifth year PhD student and native from Columbia, received her BA in Political Science
and French from the University of Houston. After several years in the
professional world she returned to academia where she joined the French
Studies department at Rice to pursue a PhD in literature. Her work
focuses on the intersections of art, death, and identity within 19th and
20th century French Caribbean literature. She recently participated in
the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture where she presented a
paper on Henri Matisse: "From Fauvism to the paper cutouts: an
itinerary of exploration." During the summer of 2009 she represented
Rice at the Dartmouth College French Cultural Studies Institute that
focused on French Culture and Religion. She is currently collaborating
in the translation of a Haitian novel into Spanish and English.
She will be working on a project called, Death, afterlife and nomadic wanderings in French Caribbean literature. The
French Caribbean authors Maryse Conde and Rene Depestre offer a unique
opportunity to study how death within a literary tradition can
contribute to the elaboration of a hybrid identity, and the (re)creation
of an innovative, autochthonous thought. What at first glance could be
perceived as the expression of tragedy and loss in the post-colonial
context, upon closer analysis emerges as the breaking of silence to
(re)invigorate the long-standing French literary tradition. Or are these
nomadic wanderings contributing to the mapping of a new tradition?
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| Grant Adamson
Third-Fourth year PhD student in Religious Studies at Rice University. His
concentration is Bible and Beyond, with broad interest in Christian
Origins and ancient Near Eastern and Classical cultures. He received his
MA from Brigham Young University in Comparative Studies (2008). His
contribution to the Codex Judas Congress, published in The Codex Judas
Papers (ed. April DeConick; Brill, 2009) is entitled "Fate Indelible:
The Gospel of Judas and Horoscopic Astrology." The descent of the soul
in the early church will be the topic of his dissertation.
His Mellon project examines the descent of the soul. The
afterlife journey is often a reversal or retracing of the steps taken
by the soul in the incarnation process. As Heraclitus said, the way up
and down are one and the same. With this in mind, for my project I will
be looking at how early Christians interpreted the sower parable and
other 'seed' material in the New Testament as referring to the descent
of the soul along the lines of Plato's Timaeus, where the higher,
rational or logical part of the soul is said to be sown by the creator.
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| Matthew Dillon
Second-Third Year PhD student, and secretary for the Seminar. He came to Rice
from San Francisco State University, where he completed his B.A. in
Philosophy and Religion summa cum laude. While there, he wrote his
senior honor's thesis on a comparative analysis of the uses of Adam in
The Zohar and Ibn-Arabi, arguing for a common mystical hermeneutic that
used the first man as a symbol to encode revelations of the human itself
as divine, if only in extraverted mystical experiences. Now studying
under Dr. Jeffrey Kripal, Matt is continuing a form of this project,
though steering his historical emphasis away from Medieval mysticism and
towards training as a comparativist in early Christianity and American
Metaphysical Religion. His dissertation serves to focus this research on
Carl Jung's recently published Red Book, where Matt is able to explore
his interests in physchoanalysis, visionary mysticism, history of
religions, and the transmission of "Gnostic" religious ideas into the
New Age.
In
this seminar, I will explore the concept of the "Land of the Dead" as
it appears in the writings of Carl Jung, especially in The Red Book and
"Septem Sermones ad Mortuos." First, I will engage the issue to what
extent he took the connection between the imagination and disembodied
spirits literally - as maintained by Richard Noll - versus how he
interpreted it psychologically. In so doing, I will deeply explore
Jung's relationships to the traditions of Spiritualism and Mesmerism,
and will attempt to parse to what extent we can interpret "the land of
the dead" as having deeper roots in Spiritualism or the nascent
psychoanalytic movement, which was, at the time, attempting to assert
itself as an empirical science.
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| Becky Gimbel
Seminar Fellow for 2010-2011. A
second-year graduate student in the department of anthropology. She
received her B.A. from George Mason University in 2009, majority in
anthropology and global affairs with a concentration in international
development. Her dissertation research, for which she began her
fieldwork in the summer of 2010, explores the relationship between
healing and death, political movements, and Bolivarian (Cuban and
Venezuelan) medical aid in Haiti.
Gimbel finished a paper draft on how concepts of the afterlife in Haiti have changed since
the earthquake in January 2010, particular in terms of the newly sensual
and public images of death that residents of Port-au-Prince confront in
their daily lives. She is in Haiti conducting field research for 2011-2012.
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| Michael Domeracki
A first-second year PhD student in the Bible and Beyond program. He
completed his undergraduate degree in Reformation History with a minor
in Religious Studies at the University of Calgary. After completing his
masters at Vanderbilt Divinity School in Early Church History he entered
a non-degree graduate program at the University of Notre Dame studying
ancient languages. He primarily works with salvation models of early
Christianity, specifically Egyptian. His masters thesis concerned the
salvation model of the Gospel of Mary in light of relevant Alexandrian, and specifically Origenic, theology.
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| Erin Evans
Seminar Student Visitor, Fall 2010. PhD Candidate, The University of Edinburgh. The
primary objective of her dissertation is to shed light on a hitherto largely unrecognized
religious school of thought emerging from the dynamic religious climate
of the first four centuries C.E. Despite the recent upsurge in interest
surrounding so-called, "Gnostic" groups arising around the dawn of
Christianity, the Books of Jeu, the Pistis Sophia, and the other
fragmentary writings of the Bruce Codex have remained largely untouched
by scholarly inquiry. In particular, the idea of a theological system
connecting them poses an intriguing historical possibly. These texts
would present literary evidence that a number of people were
significantly involved in the ideas they propound, and that the ideas
remained in circulation over a period of some time. Through analysis of
the theogonic ideas, ritual practices and the system of symbolism used
in the texts, I hope to shed greater light on the historical and
cultural context of the group developing them.
Working with
texts such as the Books of Jeu, when even the location of their
discovery is unknown, determining their precise provenance or
relationship to surrounding religious groups is nigh impossible.
However, using a historical-critical approach to the texts' contents, it
becomes possible to begin to relate them to the teachings and practices
of other Jewish, Christian, "Gnostic," and other Western mystery
religions of the first few centuries of the Common Era.
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Distinguished Guest Scholars
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| Alan F. Segal
Professor of Religion and Ingeborg Rennert Professor of Jewish Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University in Manhattan
Professor Segal's publications include Jews and Arabs: A Teaching Guide (UAHC Press), Two Powers in Heaven (Brill), Deus Ex Machina: Computers in the Humanities (Penn University Bulletin Board), Rebecca's Children: Judaism and Christanity in the Roman World (Harvard University Press), The Other Judaisms of Late AntiquityPaul the Convert: The Apostasy and Apostolate of Saul of Tarsus was
published by Yale University Press in 1990 and was the Editor's Choice,
the main selection of the History Book Club's summer list. It is also a
selection of the Book of the Month Club.
His latest book is called Life After Death: The Afterlife in Western Religions (New
York: Doubleday, 2004). It was a selection of the History Book Club,
the Book of the Month Club, and the Behavioral Science Book Club. It has
been featured on the Leonardi Lopate Show, Talk of the Nation, and was
the cover article of the Globe and Mail Book Review Supplement of
Toronto (Scholars Press).
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| Gregory Shaw
Professor of Religious Studies, Stonehill College
Born
in Lincoln, Nebraska, Shaw graduated from Arizona State University in
1977 as Outstanding Senior in the Fine Arts College. He earned an M.A.
(1980) and Ph.D. (1987) in Religious Studies at the University of
California, Santa Barbara. Joining Stonehill in 1987, he has enjoyed
working in the Religious Studies Department and with the entire
Stonehill community.
Research interests include Religions of
Late Antiquity, especially Neoplatonism, history of divination with an
emphasis on dreams; contemporary religious movements that draw from
Hermetic and Platonic sources; Jungian psychology; UFO phenomena.
He has published several articles on Neoplatonism and religions in Late Antiquity and a book Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (Penn State Press, 1995).
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| Mark Turner
Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University
He
is Founding Director of the Cognitive Science Network; Founding
President of the Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts; Fellow
of the Institute for Advanced Study, the Center for Advanced Study in
the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, the John Simon
Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Institute of Advanced Study at
Durham University, the New England Institute for Cognitive Science and
Evolutionary Psychology, the National Humanities Center, the National
Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute for the Science of
Origins; Extraordinary Member of the Humanwissenschaftliches Zentrum der
Ludiwig-Maximilians-Universitaet; External Research Professor of the
Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study. For 2011-2012, he is scheduled to
be a fellow of the Centre for Advanced Study of the Norwegian Academy of
Science and Letters.
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| Dale Martin
Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies, Yale University
Dale
B. Martin specializes in New Testament and Christian Origins, including
attention to social and cultural history of the Greco-Roman world.
Before joining the Yale faculty in 1999, he taught at Rhodes College and
Duke University. His books include: Slavery as Salvation: The Metaphor
of Slavery in Pauline Christianity; The Corinthian Body; Inventing
Superstition: From He Hippocratics to the Christians; Sex and the Single
Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation; and Pedagogy
of the Bible: an Analysis and Proposal. He has edited several books,
including (with Patricia Cox Miller), The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient
Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography. He was an associate
editor for the revision and expansion of the Encyclopedia of Religion,
published in 2005. He has published several articles on topics related
to the ancient family, gender and sexuality in the ancient world, and
ideology of modern biblical scholarship, including titles such as:
"Contradictions of Masculinity: Ascetic Inseminators and Menstruating
Men in Greco-Roman Culture." He currently is working on issues in
biblical interpretation, social history and religion in the Greco-Roman,
and sexual ethics. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment
for the Humanities, the Alexander von Humbold Foundation (German), and
Lilly Foundation, the Fulbright Commission (USA-Denmark), and the Wabash
Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion. He is a
fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 2009).
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| Roger Beck
Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto at Mississauga
Roger
Beck received his B.A. in Literae Humaniores at the Oxford University
in 1961. In 1963 he attained the A.M. in Latin at the University of
Illinois. He was Lecturer at the University of Manitoba between 1963 and
1964. In 1964 Roger Beck started his career at the University of
Toronto, Erindale College and Department of Classics (Lecturer
1964-1965, Assistant Professor 1968-1974, Associate Professor 1974-1984,
Professor 1984-1998, Professor Emeritus since 1998).
He attained
his Ph.D. in Classical Philology at University of Illinois in 1971 with
the thesis "Meter and Sense and in Homeric Verse" (Supervisor: J.J.
Bateman). He was appointed to Graduate School and cross-appointed to
Center for Religious Studies [currently Centre for the Study of
Religion] in 1978, tenure in 1973. He was Secretary of the Classical
Association of Canada between 1977 and 1979. He was Review Editor of the
Phoenix journal between 1978 and Associate Editor between 1982 and
1986. His current research interests are Mithraism and religion in the
Roman Empire; ancient astrology and astronomy, Petronius and the ancient
novel.
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