ark Vessey is Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia and holder of a Canada Research Chair in Literature / Christianity and Culture.MA in English from Cambridge and a DPhil in Ancient History from Oxford.

Main research interests are in Latin Late Antiquity, the Northern Renaissance, and Literary Theory (especially Literary History).

Observant, not to say wary, of The Book in all its forms, he writes only prefaces, reviews, essays and notes. He has edited collections on Augustine and the Disciplines (Oxford UP, forthcoming) and History, Apocalypse and the Secular Imagination (special issue of Augustinian Studies 30.2 [1999]), both with Karla Pollmann; also Holy Scripture Speaks: The Reception and Production of Erasmus’ Paraphrases on the New Testament (Toronto UP, 2002) with Hilmar M. Pabel; The Limits of Ancient Christianity (U of Michigan P, 1999); and The Markings of Heresy: Body, Text and Community in Late Ancient Christianity (special part-issue of Journal of Early Christian Studies 4.4 [1996]) with Virginia Burrus. With colleagues at the University of British Columbia and Vancouver School of Theology he is editing Title in the Text, essays on biblical hermeneutics, colonial and postcolonial histories, for U of Toronto Press.

Articles relevant to the Forum include: “From Cursus to Ductus: Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity,” in European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. Patrick Cheney and Frederick A. de Armas (U of Toronto P, 2002) 47-103; “The Citie of God (1610) and the London Virginia Company,” Augustinian Studies 30 (1999): 257-82; “The Demise of the Holy Writer and the Remaking of Late Antiquity,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6 (1998): 377-411. Another, “Reading like Angels: Derrida and Augustine on the Book,” is forthcoming in a volume on Confessions ed. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (Indiana UP).

His introduction to Cassiodorus: Institutions of Divine and Human Learning is due any day from Liverpool University Press (Translated Texts for Historians).

He is translating and annotating Erasmus’ Annotations on Luke for the Toronto “Collected Works of Erasmus” and will give the 24th Erasmus Birthday Lecture at the University of Leiden this October.

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