Virginia Burrus, PhD, professor of early church history and chair of the Graduate Division of Religion at Drew University in Madison, N.J., will give the Weltin Lecture in Religious Studies in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis Monday, April 9.
Her lecture, “St. Helia Talks Back: Christianity and the Feminization of Rhetorical Voice,” will take place at 4:30 p.m. in the Women’s Building Formal Lounge. The lecture is free and open to the public. A reception will follow.
Burrus’ teaching and research interests in the field of ancient Christianity include: gender, sexuality and the body; martyrdom and asceticism; ancient novels and hagiography; constructions of orthodoxy and heresy; and histories of theology and historical theologies.
Burrus, who earned a doctoral degree in the history of Christianity from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif., has taught in Drew University’s Theological School and Graduate Division of Religion since 1991.
She is the author of six books: Seducing Augustine: Bodies, Desires, Confessions (written with Mark Jordan and Karmen MacKendrick); Saving Shame: Martyrs, Saints and Other Abject Subjects; The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography (which has been translated into French and Italian); Begotten, Not Made: Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity; The Making of a Heretic: Gender, Authority and the Priscillianist Controversy; and Chastity as Autonomy: Women in the Stories of Apocryphal Acts.
Burrus is editor of Late Ancient Christianity: A People’s History of Christianity, Vol. II and co-editor of Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline (with Catherine Keller).
She is past president of the North American Patristics Society, associate editor of the Journal of Early Christian Studies and co-editor of the University of Pennsylvania Press series Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion.
The late Edward G. Weltin retired from full-time teaching at WUSTL after a long, distinguished career as professor of Greek and Roman history and director of the Program in Religious Studies, for which he was instrumental in developing. A lectureship in early Christian history was established in 1986 in his honor with gifts from his students and colleagues.
For more information, contact Sarah O’Donnell at relst@artsci.wustl.edu or (314) 935-8677.