English Department Events
Tom Heffernan to teach 2010 NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers in Carthage, Tunisia
The National Endowment for the Humanities has recently announced that Tom Heffernan, Kenneth Curry Chair of English, has been selected to teach an NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers in the summer of 2010. Tom’s proposal is called “’Ask of me spiritual things. Ask of me myself’: The Autobiographies of Perpetua and Augustine,” and the seminar will be held in Carthage, Tunisia.
As Tom’s proposal puts it, “Perpetua and Augustine both heeded a voice that ‘called’ them to turn inward to discover their essential being. They sought the source of that divine invitation as young adults in Carthage, and they recorded that exploration in two remarkable life histories. Both were converts to an austere, rigorist African Christianity which required a radical personal transformation and testimony. Such call to conversion demanded a revisiting of one’s past, a reassessment and abandonment of present attachments, which must lead to a new self-identification. This quest, this transformation, as I have argued elsewhere, gave birth in Africa to a new genre—autobiography—that has held center stage in the western literary tradition ever since. Their investigations of the psyche are the first systematic autobiographies ever written, have been profoundly influential in the western tradition, and they are both written by Roman African Christians--one in Carthage and the other indebted to Carthage. The chief intellectual objective of the seminar is to situate and study these texts in their different Roman African contexts and to show how the dynamic conversion experience mediated by their shared Christianity embodied in cosmopolitan Carthage led both authors to a fresh understanding of selfhood which was given a new voice in autobiography. While Augustine’s Confessions needs no introduction, the Passion of Perpetua has also become in the past twenty years a staple of early Christian studies and on gender in late antiquity. The Passion is regularly read in college and university curricula in a wide variety of disciplines.”
Tom has been drawn to this project in part through his current work on an edition of Perpetua’s autobiography, which is nearing completion. The seminar will allow the college teachers selected to participate a rare opportunity to study, on site, the intellectual influence of North African Christianity on Christian thought and to explore the roots of autobiography as a genre.