March 28, 2024

Online Magazine Reviews Barry’s Book, ‘Bishop in Flight’

Associate Professor of Religious Studies Jennifer Barry

Associate Professor of Religious Studies Jennifer Barry

On February 11, 2024, the online magazine, Ancient Jew Review, published a shining review of Prof. Jennifer Barry’s first book Bishops in Flight.

The review can be found here:

Bishops in Flight: Exile and Displacement in Late Antiquity in

Barry, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, is currently on research leave as the Harvard Loeb Classics Library Fellow for the 2024-2025 academic year. She is finalizing edits of her next book project Gender Violence in Late Antiquity.

Barry Presents Research as Harvard, Classical Loeb Library Fellow

Jennifer Barry

Associate Professor of Religious Studies Jennifer Barry

This spring, Jennifer Barry, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, will present material from her research project Gender Violence in Late Antiquity. She will present a chapter of the book at the Boston Patristics Society on February 15, 2024, and will give a public lecture at the University of Denver on February 29, 2024. As a Harvard, Classical Loeb Fellow for the 2023-2024 academic year, Barry has used her leave to finish her monograph. She has also started work on a number of additional publication opportunities as well as her next book-length project on Scandalous Christian Histories.

Barry Presents at National Conference in Denver

Jennifer Barry, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, recently presented in two panels at the national conference for the Society of Biblical Literature and American Academy of Religion.

For the first panel, sponsored by the SBallies unit, Barry participated in a roundtable on the #MeToo movement and issues around harassment, how to be an ally to people facing harassment or discrimination, and what to do if you see or experience harassment. Each panelist gave a short presentation and then generated a productive conversation with the audience. 

During the second panel, sponsored by the Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism session, Barry reviewed David M. Litwa’s recent translation of the Refutation of All Heresies: Text, Translation, and Notes (Atlanta, 2016). Barry was invited to this panel by special request.

The SBLAAR conference was particularly productive and Barry was asked to join the steering committee for the SBL program unit on Exile and Biblical Literature due to her work on exile.

Jennifer Barry Quoted in Daily Beast Article

Assistant Professor of Religion Jennifer Barry was recently interviewed and quoted in the online news and opinion site the Daily Beast. The article is titled, “Egeria, One of Christianity’s First Female Pilgrims, Was a Badass” and written by Candida Moss (the Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham, UK).

The article, written for a public audience, draws attention to a famous early Christian pilgrim whose work is one of the rare occasions of a woman writing and reflecting on her travels in the ancient world (4th c. CE).

Barry frequently teaches on Egeria and other notable early Christian women in her courses and was sought out by Dr. Moss for her expertise and interest in the study of gender and religion.

Barry Presents at International Conferences in United Kingdom

Jennifer Barry, Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Mary Washington, recently attended three conferences and one workshop in the United Kingdom. Barry was invited to present a paper at the Birkbeck Institute, University of London for the “Exiles, Sanctions and Punishments in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages” colloquium. Professor Barry was then invited to present a paper at the International Medieval Congress hosted by the University of Leeds. Both events allowed Barry to showcase material stemming out of her forthcoming book, Bishops in Flight: Exile and Displacement in Late Antiquity.

Professor Barry was also invited to attend the pre-conference workshop and conference on Religion & Rape Culture, which was supported by The Shiloh Project. Barry is now an active member of the project and will be co-developing a pedagogical research group alongside of her University of Sheffield colleague Meredith Warren. The working group will focus on teaching rape culture in the religious studies classroom.

Barry presents at North American Patristics Society and is elected to the board

Jennifer Barry, Assistant Professor of Religion, recently presented at the North American Patristics Society. At a pre-arranged panel on Theorizing Gender and Violence, which she co-organized, Barry showcased new material from her next book-length project in a paper, titled, “Fantasy, Violence, and the Suffering Self.”

Jennifer Barry was also elected to the national board of the North American Patristics Society. This appointed position is a distinct honor. Barry will serve as a voting member for three years.

Barry Presents at Yale University

Jennifer Barry, Assistant Professor of Religion, presented her paper “Remembering Exile: Ecclesiastical Historians and Christian Flight” at Yale University on April 23, 2018. This paper stems out of a chapter from her forthcoming book with the University of California Press titled Bishops in Flight: Exile and Displacement in Late Antiquity.

Barry Co-Organizes First Millennium Network Event

Assistant Professor of Religion Jennifer Barry helped co-organize a series of events in the  Washington D.C. area throughout the academic year for the First Millennium Network (firstmillenniumnetwork.org). The FMN is a cross-institutional collaborative network that hosts academic events around Northern Virginia and Washington D.C. Barry’s involvement in the Network has been a direct response to UMW’s President Troy Paino’s call to put Mary Washington on the map. The Network places special emphasis on the diversity of, and interconnections among, the religious communities within first millennium societies—Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Manicheanism, Zoroastrianism, etc.—in their multitude of forms.

On Friday, April 13, 2018, Barry, along with her fellow steering committee members, organized a day-long colloquium on “The Materiality of Relics in the First Millennium” at the University of Maryland, College Park. Four experts on relics and materiality broadly conceived were invited to share their research. Their disciplines ranged from archaeology, Carolingian textiles, Byzantine liturgical studies, and early Islamic textual practices. Each speaker was charged with the task to talk across their disciplinary boundaries, which helped to generate new and creative conversations. The day concluded with a session of reflection lead by Jennifer Barry and Samuel Collins to promote interdisciplinary connections and address thematic threads throughout the day.

Barry Presents at National Conference in Chicago

At the end of May, Jennifer Barry, Assistant Professor of Religion, presented at the North American Patristics Conference. During the conference, Barry facilitated a digital humanities workshop on “Mapping the Marginalized” along with Sarah Bond (Assistant Professor of Classics, University of Iowa). Both scholars introduced their colleagues to new GIS tools for visualizing maps and clerical exile for both their own research and pedagogical development. Barry specifically discussed the Clerical Exile project, which is an international, interdisciplinary project she has been a part of since 2015.

Barry also present a paper later in the week titled “Damning Cities: The case against Nicomedia and her bishop.” This paper was based on material from her working monograph and uses space and place theory to trace how the ancient city of Nicomedia was slowly condemned, along with her bishop Eusebius, by late ancient ecclesiastical historians.

 

Barry Organizes Conference at Georgetown University

Jennifer Barry, Assistant Professor of Religion, co-organized a day-long conference at Georgetown University on April 28, 2017. She is a steering committee member of the First Millennium Network, a cross-disciplinary working group in conjunction with scholars from the Catholic University of America, George Mason University, Georgetown University and the University of Maryland, College Park.

The conference consisted of several world-renowned speakers who specialize in Apocalyptic Literature from a variety of different disciplines and areas of focus such as Jewish Studies, Islamic Studies and Medieval Studies. The University of Mary Washington has only recently joined the First Millennium Network through Barry’s ongoing efforts in connecting UMW to the greater DC area.

The First Millennium Network seeks to extend the scholarly perspective by finding creative ways to encourage interdisciplinary and comparative study of the entirety of the first millennium of the Common Era, particularly in Western Europe, Byzantium and the Islamic world. The Network places special emphasis on the diversity of, and interconnections among, the religious communities within first millennium societies—Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Manicheanism, Zoroastrianism, etc.—in their multitude of forms. To find out more, follow us on Twitter (@First1000Net) Facebook, or visit our website.