Cliona Murphy's review of Prostitution and Irish Society 1800-1940, by Maria Luddy, was published in H-Albion earlier this Fall. Former student Matt Zaninovich kindly bought this book for our library (among other books). Murphy will review two books on gender and Irish History for Women's History Review over the break. In December she will attend the Spanish Institute of Puebla. While there, she will continue research for a paper she will give in Michoacan in July.
Miriam Raub Vivian will be on sabbatical in winter quarter 2009. She will be working on an article for a volume entitled "The Visible and the Invisible in Roman Religion," whose contributors were participants in the National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar in Rome in 2007. Her paper, “Visions of Holiness: The Visibility of Ascetics in Late Antiquity,” will focus on how the emergence and accessibility of Christian ascetics in the Late Roman Empire contributed to a shift in the concept of the visibility of holiness. Whereas Romans devoted to a pantheon of gods envisioned those gods by visiting their sanctuaries and studying their statues, Christian ascetics made a vision of God possible for Romans as they set their sights on men and women who personified holiness through their renunciation of the material world and their particular spiritual feats. This changing attitude toward the visibility of holiness represents one element in the transformation from classical to Christian culture in the Late Roman Empire.
