Shepardson wins ACLS Fellowship
Christine (Tina) Shepardson, Assistant Professor of Early Christianity in the Department of Religious Studies, has been awarded a 2009-2010 ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. The prestigious national ACLS Fellowships promote research in the humanities and related social sciences by allowing scholars to be released from their teaching obligations for a full year in order to pursue their research full time. Shepardson is one of 57 winners from the 1007 applications by faculty of all ranks from around the country. Shepardson’s first book, Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem’s Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria, was released October 2008, and she was a 2008 recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, and a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society.
Shepardson was awarded the ACLS Fellowship for her book project, “Controlling Contested Places: Fourth-Century Antioch and the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy.” She describes the project as follows: Early Christian leaders fundamentally shaped their landscape and therefore the events unfolding in it. This study will demonstrate that places in the Roman city of Antioch were ever-shifting sites for the negotiation of power in late antiquity. Examining competing Christian leaders’ physical and rhetorical efforts to control and redefine Antioch’s topography will unveil some of the powerful mechanisms through which local places affected identity and perceptions of religious orthodoxy. This will revise earlier narratives of Christianization and the development of Christian orthodoxy by revealing ways in which leaders deployed the allegedly inert backdrop of Antioch’s urban and rural places to shape the outcome of critical fourth-century intra-Christian controversies.