Research

The Center is involved in coordinating a number of on-going collaborative research ventures. The two most prominent are:

• The Midwestern Consortium on Ancient Religions (now in its ninth year) organizes an annual conference that rotates between the campuses of the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan and the Ohio State University.
• The more recently established Chicago-Paris Working Group on Ancient Religions organizes an annual symposium that brings together scholars working on ancient religions at the University of Chicago and at the universities and research institutions in Paris.

This collaborative work crosses a number of institutional boundaries. At the University of Chicago itself contributors to these projects and research agendas include:

• Division of Humanities:
  Jas’ Elsner and Richard Neer (Art History);
  Clifford Ando, Alain Bresson, Christopher Faraone, Jonathan Hall, and Emanuel Mayer (Classics);
  Donald Harper and Paul Copp (East Asian Languages and Civilizations)
• The College:
  J.Z. Smith
• Divinity School:
  Bruce Lincoln, David Martinez and Margaret Mitchell
• Division of Social Sciences in the Committee on Social Thought:
  Glenn Most and James Redfield
• The Oriental Institute:
  Robert Ritner, Martha Roth, David Schloen, Theo van den Hout, Christopher Woods and others.

And although the University has two graduate degree-granting units that bring some of these faculty together, namely, the Department of New Testament and Early Christian Literature in the Divinity School and the Program in the Ancient Mediterranean World in the Classics Department, neither brings together the full range of faculty that could potentially contribute, nor can either, existing as each does within a specific disciplinary paradigm, give full expression to the theoretical and empirical richness of the evidence and its modern readings.