AJR is pleased to host a series of articles on method, ethics, and historiography in the study of late antique Christianity. These articles all originated as papers presented at a roundtable during a conference hosted by the Global Late Antiquity Society from May 30 – June 2, 2021.
Forum | Method, Ethics, and Historiography : Tracing Christians in Global Late Antiquity Roundtable
“To ‘trace Christians’ in a ‘global late antiquity’ is to grapple with how the global has too long been framed in Christian terms anyway,” notes Annette Yoshiko Reed in her contribution to this roundtable.
Forum | Method, Ethics, and Historiography : Opening Remarks
I am a classicist by training, and I work on the history of ancient libraries. For the past few years, I have been working out how to write an ethical history of libraries and a history of knowledge more broadly, because, to my mind, an intersectional feminist intervention is needed very badly to counter the histories classicists are writing today.
Forum | Method, Ethics, and Historiography : A Late Ancient Caribbean in the Temporalities of Empire
The late Christopher Schmidt-Nowara gives the name of the “conquest of history” to the archival curation of national histories in what would become Spain’s former colonies in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Forum | Method, Ethics, and Historiography: Tracing a Global Late Antiquity from and beyond Christianity
We spend a lot of time speaking about what we study and how. When putting together the recent conference on “Tracing Christians in Global Late Antiquity,” the organizers wisely decided to open with a panel discussion on method, ethics, and historiography—a topic that opens a space for addressing what we talk about too little, namely, who.
Forum | Method, Ethics, and Historiography: The Shift of Interpretative Allegiance
Political theorist Hannah Arendt argued in her 1951 seminal work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, that European totalitarianism is historically and conceptually rooted in antisemitism and imperialism.
Forum | Method, Ethics, and Historiography: Late Antiquity, Reckoning
Could we step back for a moment from the work that we do that so captures our attention, to think about not just the state of the field as we usually discuss and debate, but also about its very relevance? Its raison d’être?