"Wayward Life: Reading Mary of Egypt with Saidiya Hartman" - Prof. Virginia Burrus, 10/19 @ 7pm

Please join Professor Virginia Burrus, Croghan Visiting Professor in Biblical and Early Christian Studies, for her public lecture, “Wayward Life: Reading Mary of Egypt with Saidiya Hartman,” on Thursday, October 19 at 7 p.m. in Schapiro 129. A reception with light refreshments will follow in the atrium. RSVPs to kf8@williams.edu are helpful, but not required.

Abstract:

Wayward Life: Reading Mary of Egypt with Saidiya Hartman

This lecture places a particular late ancient Christian text—the seventh-century Greek Life of Mary of Egypt–in dialogue with a particular work of contemporary Black scholarship—Saidiya Hartman’s 2019 Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Hartman’s artfully crafted monograph focuses on U.S. cities at the turn of the twentieth century, pursuing the traces of young Black women who have typically been framed as socially or morally deficient—“wayward,” that is. Pushing back against the bias of her archive, she shows how these women “struggled to create autonomous and beautiful lives, to escape the new forms of servitude awaiting them, and to live as if they were free.” Hartman’s work provokes me to revisit the so-called “harlot saint” Mary of Egypt (about whom I have written more than once before), attending anew to her “waywardness,” her “beautiful experiments,” and the forceful suppression of those experiments by her hagiographer and subsequent readers who have seen in her merely a figure of depravity and repentance. It provokes me to think more too about Mary’s Blackness. The lecture will be organized around five fragments from Mary’s Life–a nude, a spindle, a ship, an icon, a landscape. Thinking with Hartman, we might imagine them as unlabeled photographs, torn from context, waiting to be assembled into new histories, however speculative and incomplete.

Virginia Burrus–Bio

Virginia Burrus is the Croghan Visiting Professor of Early Christianity at Williams College (Fall 2023) and the Bishop W. Earl Ledden Professor of Religion at Syracuse University. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2021 and is the author, most recently, of Earthquakes and Gardens: Saint Hilarion’s Cyprus (2023); Ancient Christian Ecopoetics (2019); The Lives of Constantina (2020), co-authored with Marco Conti and Dennis Trout; and Byzantine Tree Life (2021), co-authored with Thomas Arentzen and Glenn Peers.