Department of Religious Studies

Derek Krueger, Professor and Head

Ph.D. Religion, Princeton University 1991

kruegerd@uncg.edu

Areas of Academic Interest:

• Religion in Late Antiquity
• Early Christianity
• Byzantine Studies
• Gender Studies

Personal Statement:

As a historian of Christian culture in Late Antiquity and Byzantium, I have posed a variety of questions about the practice of Christianity in the pre-modern Eastern Mediterranean. My most recent monograph, Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East (2004), explores how Christian literature both reflects and shapes Christian ideas about holiness, society, and literature itself. I charted how the authors of various early Christian saints' lives and hymns understood the work of authorship as a Christian religious activity. More recently, I have edited a volume on lay Christian practice in Byzantium.  Now I am working concurrently on two projects.  The first explores how the culture of monasticism in Byzantium produced ideas about masculinity, gender, sexuality, and friendship. The second uncovers the role of religious ritual in the formation of ideas about the self in Byzantium from the sixth to the ninth century.  This project, on what I call "the liturgical formation of identity," uses both literary and material evidence to reconstruct lay patterns of self-reflection and self-regard, including the patterning of the moral conscience.

Books:

• Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius's Life and the Late Antique City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
• Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
• Byzantine Christianity, edited by Derek Krueger. A People's History of Christianity 3 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006).
  

Recent publications:

• "Romanos the Melodist and the Christian Self in Early Byzantium," Proceedings of the 21st International Congress of Byzantine Studies, London, 2006,  vol. I, Plenary Papers. Edited by Elizabeth Jeffreys. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, 247-266.
  
• “Homoerotic Spectacle and the Monastic Body in Symeon the New Theologian,” in Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline, edited by Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 99-118.
• “The Unbounded Body in the Age of Liturgical Reproduction,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 17 (2009): 267-279.

In press:

“Mary at the Threshold: The Mother of God as Guardian in Seventh-Century Palestinian Miracle Accounts.” In The Cult of the Mother of God in Byzantium. Edited by Leslie Brubaker and Mary Cunningham. Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming.

“Early Byzantine Historiography and Hagiography as Different Modes of Christian Practice.” In Writing “True Stories”: Historians and Hagiographers in the Late Antique and Mediaeval Near East , edited by Arietta Papaconstantinou, Muriel Debié, and Hugh Kennedy, Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 9. Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming 2009.

“The Old Testament in Monasticism,” The Old Testament in Byzantium, ed. Paul Magdalino and Robert Nelson. Washington: Dumbarton Oaks, forthcoming, 2009.

“The Liturgical Creation of a Christian Past: Identity and Community in Anaphoral Prayers,” in Unclassical Traditions: Alternatives to the Classical Past in Late Antiquity, ed. Christopher Kelly, Michael Williams, and Richard Flower, Cambridge Classical Journal Supplementary Volume 35. Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, forthcoming 2009.

“Between Monks: Tales of Monastic Companionship in Early Byzantium,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 19 (forthcoming, 2012, 70pp).

Work in progress:

Book project: Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual and the Formation of Identity in Byzantium, Sixth to Ninth Centuries.

“The Cult of Relics in Late Antiquity,” for Matter of Faith: Relics, Art, and Sanctity in the Middle Ages, ed. Martina Bagnoli, Holger Klein, and Charles Griffith Mann (exhibition catalogue).

“The Great Kanon of Andrew of Crete, the Penitential Bible, and the Liturgical Formation of Identity in the Byzantine Dark Age.”

Recent Courses Taught:

• Rel 104: Religion, Ritual, and the Arts
• Rel 204: New Testament and the Origins of Christianity
• Rel 210: Christianity to the Reformation
• Rel 301: Early Christianity
• Rel 303: The Practice of Christianity in Byzantium (500-1200)
• Rel 310: Christianity and the Construction of Gender (Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern)
• Rel 314: Early Christian Saints' Lives
• Rel 503: Religion, Gender, and Culture (Critical Gender Theory and Religion)