Adam Shear participated in the annual conference of the Renaissance Society of America in Boston in March. He gave a paper on his research on a Venetian publisher of Jewish books in the sixteenth century, “Books from Giovanni di Gara’s Venice Press North of the Alps” in a session on “The Afterlives of Jewish Books” and chaired a session on perspectives on Jewish history in Jewish and non-Jewish archives.
Ben Gordon will be giving a paper called “Water and Wellness in Early Roman Judea: A Health-Oriented Approach to the Ancient Mikveh” at a colloquium called “Jews and Health: Bodies, Perceptions, Practices” at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, April 28–29.
Jaimie Gunderson delivered a lecture to the Biblical Archaeology Society of Northern Virginia in Fairfax, VA in February. The talk, "Early Christianity in Rough Cilicia," focused on her archaeological work in southern Turkey. At the end of April, she is participating in a conference at the University of Texas at Austin called "Imagining the ‘Dazzling’ Body: Ancient Sense Models and the Materialization of the Sacred." Her paper, "Ugly Paul," examines the unflattering physical description of the apostle Paul in the Acts of Paul and Thecla as part of a literary tradition of ugliness extending back to Aesop.
Cuilan Liu was invited to attend "A Silk Road Oasis Symposium: Exploring Dunhuang's Multifaceted Legacy" at the British Library in London from February 21 to February 22, 2025. At this symposium, she gave a presentation on "Buddhist Slave Trade on the Silk Road?" In this presentation, she discussed how Buddhist institutions and individual monks and nuns were involved in the slave trade as buyers, owners, sellers, and transaction witnesses along the Silk Road.
Dr. Marcela Perdomo will be a featured participant in the Crossroads Project: A Conversation on Materiality and Africana Religions, hosted by Dr. Anthea Butler, Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania, from April 3–5, 2025. As part of this gathering, she will take part in a scholarly conversation centered on her recent article, “The Guli: A Shrine of Fluctuating Agencies. Materiality and Psychosomatic Experience in the Afro-Amerindian Religion of Dugu,” published in Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art, and Belief (2024, pp. 1–22). The article explores the dynamic interplay between ritual objects, bodily experience, and spirit possession in Garifuna religious practice.
In May, Dr. Perdomo will also present at the international conference "Mémoires et identités autochtones dans l’aire amazonico-caraïbe : entre confrontations, émergences et ruptures" (“Indigenous Memories and Identities in the Amazonian-Caribbean Region: Confrontations, Emergences, and Ruptures”), held at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens and Rouen, France, from May 22–23, 2025. Her presentation, entitled « Dugu et la Mémoire de l’Exil : Possession et Conscience Historique chez les Garifunas du Honduras » (“Dugu and the Memory of Exile: Possession and Historical Consciousness among the Garifuna of Honduras”), will examine how ritual possession in the Garifuna tradition acts as a form of embodied historical remembrance and diasporic identity.