Rebecca Falcasantos
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rsfalcasantos.bsky.social
Rebecca Falcasantos
@rsfalcasantos.bsky.social
2.1K followers 200 following 160 posts
Assistant Professor of Religion @AmherstCollege • currently trying to make Socrates of Constantinople cool again
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rsfalcasantos.bsky.social
Here, too.
April 12, 2025 at 10:56 AM
rsfalcasantos.bsky.social
Wall of Lucus Augusti (Lugo, Spain)
January 19, 2025 at 2:28 AM
rsfalcasantos.bsky.social
January 3, 2025 at 7:52 AM
rsfalcasantos.bsky.social
I know many of us are finishing papers for SBL/AAR, but a quick reminder that the NAPS CFP is open until Monday.

I encourage you to submit an abstract for the session Jeremy Schott and I are organizing on Comedy, Satire, and Humor in Late Antique Polemic
Late antique authors frequently rely on humor to entertain and to maintain the interest of their audiences. Amusing tales, descriptive excurses, and other “funny” textual moments appear in histories, heresiology, apologetics, hagiography, and other genres. Oftentimes these episodes involve humor in some way. A martyr talks back to his persecutors as he is roasted on a grill. A monk makes a caustic jab that undercuts a bishop’s claim to authority. One bishop twists another bishop’s comment into a joke. This session seeks to examine how humor functions within late antique polemic. While a number of studies in the past two decades have examined humor in antiquity (e.g., Plaza 2006; Griffith and Marks 2007; Beard 2014; Kidd 2014), these studies tend to focus on identifying what counted as humor and how it appears on the classical stage and in epic and the literature of the Second Sophistic. But the use of these elements in late antique texts–particularly polemic–has received less attention. Why do late antique polemicists include comedic situations? Does satire offer him a particular edge in argumentation? What is missed when the humor of an altercation is misrecognized? To answer these questions, we invite papers that critically engage and analyze the appearance of comedy, satire, and other forms of humor in various genres of polemic, including heresiology, homiletics, historiography, philosophy, and hymnography, as well as papers that reexamine interactions that are not usually through these lenses and open new possibilities for analyzing the narrative.
November 19, 2024 at 3:58 PM
rsfalcasantos.bsky.social
Well, since I have so many new followers, here’s a treat form this week’s travel: a pair of small shoes, probably for a child, on display at the British Museum. They’re about the size of my hand.
September 20, 2024 at 1:31 PM
rsfalcasantos.bsky.social
It's SBL abstract time again. Here's the CFP for the Religious Competition program unit. Send your abstract our way!
This year we will accept papers for three sessions. 1. We invite papers on the intersection of gender, power, and group competition. Topics might include discourses and practices of gender inclusion or exclusion, gender constructions, policing or contesting gender performances, rape culture, and related questions. 2. We seek papers that focus on modern competitions over facets of religious antiquity, especially those addressing the methods, goals, and impact of these competitions on the reception and overall understanding of the ancient world. 3. We welcome proposals on any topic related to religious competition in the ancient Mediterranean basin and late antique southwest Asia between and across all religious traditions. We are particularly keen to review proposals that focus on new approaches or methodologies to study religious competition in Late Antiquity, including Digital Humanities, for example social network analysis or digital text analysis.
March 4, 2024 at 8:00 PM
rsfalcasantos.bsky.social
Just came back from a colloquy, where someone reminded me of this morsel, so I'm re-sharing. (I'm very happy they got a screenshot before I killed my account on the other site).
August 4, 2023 at 11:06 PM