Keynote Speakers
For the 2024 Tantur Florovsky Symposium, we are excited to invite several distinguished scholars from universities across the United States to give keynote lectures on various aspects of the relation between affect and pedagogy within the Christian tradition. We hope that these lectures will provide rich and frutiful dialogue across ecumencial boundaries and academic disciplines. Below you can find more information about our speakers and the topics on which they will be presenting.
Natalie Carnes
Natalie Carnes is Professor of Theology at Baylor University. She is a constructive theologian who reflects on questions of theological aesthetics, feminist theology, and systematic theology in the conviction that these three areas of inquiry, though distinct, also illumine one another.
Professor Carnes' lecture, "Theology as Affective Encounter: Constructive Feminist possibilities in Early Christian Texts and Artifacts," focuses on how the logic of witness births and animates some of the earliest Christian texts and artifacts, and then, on what it would mean to receive them as such today, the paper turns to Augustine and his own affective encounter with Scripture.
Andrew Davis
Andrew R. Davis is Professor of Old Testament in the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry. Andrew's research interests include Biblical narrative; Prophetic literature; The Book of Job; feminist approaches to the Old Testament; ancient Israelite religion; and Biblical historiography.
Professor Davis' lecture, "Divine Tears, Prophetic Pedagogy, and the Balm in Gilead (Jer 8:18-9:2)," focuses on the shared grief between Yhwh and the prophet and how the prophet’s participation in Yhwh’s emotional life in becomes the basis of his instruction to the mourning women.
Sarah Gador-Whyte
Sarah Gador-Whyte is Research Fellow in the Institute of Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University. Her main areas of research are: late antique rhetoric, dialogue, and literature, including in liturgy, hymnography and homiletics; late-antique history and historiography; gender studies and history of women in Late Antiquity and Byzantium; and interreligious dialogue and conflict.
Professor Gador-Whyte's lecture, "Emotions of Night Worship: Crafting Fear and Joy in Night Vigil Hymnography," focuses on the worship setting of the night vigil as the ideal classroom for Christian emotional transformation.
Dawn LaValle Norman
Dawn LaValle Norman is Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University. Her research centres on the Greek literature of the Roman Empire during the transitional period from the first to the fourth centuries CE, looking especially at the conversation between Christian and non-Christian literary texts during this period. Much of her work focuses on the history of the philosophical dialogue.
Professor Norman's lecture, "Blushing Philosophers in Early Christianity: Embarrassment and Education," focuses on blushing within the tradition of representing emotions in dialogues and theories about the purpose of showing dialogic emotions, finally, it turns from a consideration of the emotions of students to some of the emotions of teachers in dialogues.
Fr. Michael Magree, S.J.
Fr. Michael C. Magree is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theology at Boston College. Some of his research interests include ascetical theology; early Christian scriptural exegesis; theological interpretation of Scripture; the history of Christological and Trinitarian doctrine.
Professor Magree's lecture, “Cyril of Alexandria on Christ the Emotional Teacher and the Teacher of Emotions,” focuses on Cyril’s Festal Letters and his Commentary on John . It concentrates on Cyril’s account of fasting and the eucharist, and how both this ascetical practice and this liturgical celebration involve a re-ordering of the Christian believer’s affections away from merely fleshly objects and toward the love of God.
Jeff Wickes
Jeff Wickes is Associate Professor in the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. Jeff's research focues on the interplay between Syriac literature, theology, and liturgy in the context of late antique Christianity. His work gravitates towards larger questions of genre (especially poetry), religion, and theology as they play out within the historical horizons of late antique Christianity, and as those horizons meet our own in the contemporary world.
Professor Wickes' lecture, "Affect, Syriac Poetry, and the Liturgies of an Uncertain World," will focus on how Syriac poets ritualized the world in surprising ways—as an ultimately unknowable object of didactic wonder and unexpected agency, and how in these liturgical representations, the poetry's goal was not merely to convey content, but to shape audiences' affective orientations.