“The Sacred and Sonorous Desert: Acoustic Ecology and the Monastic Tradition”

Early Christian monasticism developed, in part, from ancient quests for solitude and silence, and in close relationship to the desert, both real and imagined. This talk will use field recordings from modern desert environments, and the field of acoustic ecology more broadly, to help shed light on the monastic traditions of late ancient Egypt, Palestine, and Sinai.

Kim Haines-Eitzen (Ph.D., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1997) is a Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Religions with a specialty in Early Christianity, Early Judaism, and Religion in Late Antiquity in the Department of Near Eastern Studies. Her most recent book is Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks and What It Can Teach Us (Princeton University Press, 2022), a project that traces how desert sounds shaped early Christian monasticism and includes field recordings she has made in desert environments. She is the author of Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature (Oxford University Press, 2000), a social history of the scribes who copied Christian texts during the second and third centuries; and The Gendered Palimpsest: Women, Writing, and Representation in Early Christianity, which deals with the intersection of gender and text transmission (Oxford University Press, 2012).  She is a member of the programs in Religious Studies, Jewish Studies, Medieval Studies, and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell.  To learn more about her recent work and her media appearances, visit her website: http://kimhaineseitzen.wordpress.com

This lecture is made possible by the grant, "In Lumine: Supporting the Catholic Intellectual Tradition on College Campuses Nationwide," (Grant #62372) from the John Templeton Foundation.