CATHERINE CONYBEARE
Research
Interests:
Late Antiquity, Early Christian Studies, contemporary theory
Courses:
Classical Studies: Augustine and the Classical Tradition, Epistolography
Latin: Roman Satire, Cicero’s Philosophical Dialogues
Graduate Group Seminars: Gendering the Past, Birth and Becoming
Recent Publications:
The Irrational Augustine (Oxford 2006)
'The Duty of a Teacher: a Liminal Disciplina in the De ordine', in Augustine and the Disciplines: Towards a Christian Theory of Knowledge ed. K. Pollmann and M. Vessey (Oxford 2005).
'Spaces Between Letters: Augustine's Letters to Women', with a response by Mark Vessey, in Voices in Dialogue: New Problems in Reading Women's Cultural History ed. K. Kerby-Fulton and L. Olson (Notre Dame 2005).
Personal Statement:
I love graduate teaching. Every seminar I've taught here has been incredibly stimulating, whether it's taken me back to material I thought I knew well already, or prompted me to engage with new texts. The Roman Satire course in Spring '04 was a case in point: juxtaposing material from Lucilius to Claudian and discussing it with a vigorous and vocal group (who loved Horace and hated Jerome!) brought me repeatedly to new intertexts and insights. The Graduate Group seminars, familiarly known as GSems, provide exciting new opportunities, too: they are team-taught by members of different departments in the Graduate Group. I have just taught a most exciting GSem with a colleague who specializes in film studies: this was "Birth and Becoming", in which we addressed the notion of natality - a comprehensive challenge to the obsession of the Western philosophical tradition with death and the afterlife. We started with Hannah Arendt, who coined the idea, and followed natality and its corollaries in contemporary thinkers ranging from Judith Butler through Grace Jantzen to Luce Irigaray. Various films illustrated our theme: Agnès Varda's Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse proved particularly fruitful.
The seminars that have fitted most closely with my current preoccupations, however, are "Augustine and the Classical Tradition" and "Cicero's Philosophical Dialogues". I have just finished a book which takes as its starting point Augustine's early Ciceronian dialogues. Entitled The Irrational Augustine (forthcoming: Oxford 2006), it essays a minute enquiry with far-reaching consequences. What happens if one questions the idea of ratio (which may variously - and in each case unsatisfactorily - be translated as reason, rationality, or proportion) as a crucial constitutive part of a human being? (Cicero's definition of a human being was "animal rationale et mortale".) How would one even go about structuring such an interrogation? The ramifications extend into many areas of importance to intellectual discussion today: what are the consequences for how one values the body? women? children? memory? How is one to structure an argumentative system which is intellectually satisfying, and yet does not exclude those whose grasp of ratio is traditionally considered to be imperfect? Thinking of dialogic form, it's been fun to develop these ideas in conversation with the students here.
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