Prof. Cavan Concannon (USC): “An Assemblage Approach to Early Christianity, Deleuze, Latour, and the Letters of Dionysios of Corinth”

Modern historians map the diversity of early Christianity in a variety of ways, from declines into heresy to competition among “varieties” of early Christianities. Drawing particularly on the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour, Concannon argues that  we might better map the remains of second-century Christianity by focusing on networks of people, ideas, and letters that moved along broader patterns of trade and communication in the eastern Mediterranean. Focusing on the costs, velocities, and viscosities of movement and commerce, he examines the network associated with Dionysios of Corinth, whose writings come to us only as fragments and summaries in Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History. Concannon shows how non-human actants such as geography, economic activity, and trade routes shape the interactions within Dionysios’ network, allowing us to think more broadly about second-century Christianity as a series of emergent networks that form, coalesce, and dissolve in the flow of movement and connectivity that characterized the Roman Mediterranean. Sponsored by the Ancient Borderlands RFG.