PSCO
Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins
an Interdisciplinary Humanities Seminar
in its fiftieth-eighth year under the auspices of
The University of Pennsylvania
Department of Religious Studies
201 Cohen Hall, Philadelphia PA 19104
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Topic for the Year 2014–2015 (Year 52):
Formative Figures and Paths Not Taken:
The Study of Ancient Judaism and Christianity between History and Historiography
Co-Chairs: Annettee Yoshiko Reed (UPenn),
Matthew Chalmers (UPenn), and Natalie Dohrmann (UPenn)
PSCO Coordinator: Annette Yoshiko Reed (UPenn)
During our fifty-second year, the PSCO will explore “Formative Figures and Paths Not Taken: The Study of Ancient Judaism and Christianity between History and Historiography.” In concert with the 2014-2015 Katz Center theme-year on “New Perspectives on the Origins, Context, and Diffusion of the Academic Study of Judaism,” we will focus on key figures in the study of ancient Judaism and Christianity in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, situating them both in terms of their own modern contexts and in terms of their contribution to scholarship on antiquity.
We are hoping to revisit formative contributions to scholarship but also to recover forgotten insights and interesting paths not taken — especially in relation to the interactions of Jewish studies and Jewish scholars with the dominantly Christian contexts of early research. In the process, we hope to bring historians of antiquity into conversation with historians of modernity so as to help situate our own scholarly endeavors as part of ongoing contextualized reflections and continually remade memories of ancient Jewish and Christian pasts.