SanPietro to Talk on “Charity and the Creation of the Church”
Dr. Irene SanPietro, assistant dean of students at Columbia University, will give a talk on “Charity and the Creation of the Church” at Washington and Lee University on Friday, Dec. 5, at 4 p.m. in Huntley Hall 327, Williams School.
SanPietro’s talk is free and open to the public. The lecture is supported by the Howerton Fund of the Religion Department, the Department of Classics and the Roger Mudd Center for Ethics.
SanPietro said, “My research interests are primarily in the social and economic history of late antiquity.” She wrote her dissertation on the institutions and ideology of the church and, she said, “Specifically, how charity redrew the boundaries of public and private life on a mass scale, affected the inner life of individuals and determined the form of institutions that would outlast Rome.”
SanPietro continued, “I am working on a book project based on my dissertation and several smaller projects, including a study of Strabo’s orientalism, the replacement of the Roman aristocratic ideal of the polymath with that of the convert-knower in Christian circles, legal responses to family disputes over pious donations and mapping Jerome’s “De viris illustribus” using social network theory.”
SanPietro received her doctorate in classical studies from Columbia University in 2014.
