The Department of Classics extends its congratulations to Dr. Aldo Tagliabue, assistant professor, for his recent award of a Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers. This is a 12-month-long fellowship based at the University of Giessen (Germany).
In Gießen, Dr. Tagliabue will be hosted by Professor Peter Von Möllendorff and will work to complete his monograph ‘Experiencing the Divine in Narratives of the Imperial Era.’ A description of the monograph has been included below.
Can ancient narratives impart their experiential quality when they have a god or a divinely inspired experience as their main theme? Building upon recent developments of cognitive narratology within and outside Classics, the monograph ‘Experiencing the Divine’ shows two different ways in which narratives of the Imperial Roman era make the divine experiential for the readers. The first way is the introduction of embodied and immersive accounts of divine epiphanies, which present a marked bodily language. The second way is the use of non-sequential devices such as anticipations and repetitions which jolt readers out of a temporal sequence, and let them gain a glimpse of divine timelessness. Overall, this project engages recent work on narratology, aesthetics and religious experience. The monograph includes five chapters which focus on the following texts: Aristides’ The Sacred Tales (2 CE), Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe (2 CE), Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (2 CE), The Shepherd of Hermas (2 CE) and Perpetua’s Passion (3 CE).