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.