PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity
Kevin von Bladel
Kevin van Bladel is Associate Professor of Classics and Director of the Middle East Studies Program at the University of Southern California. He studies the formation of learned traditions in Arabic out of older materials in Greek, Aramaic, Sanskrit, and Iranian languages, and the interaction of different language communities in the first millennium CE. He received his PhD in Graeco-Arabic Studies in 2004 at Yale University. He is the author of The Arabic Hermes (Oxford University Press, 2009) and several articles on topics including Qur'anic cosmology, Arabic pseudepigrapha, the stories about Alexander of Macedon in Arabic, and eighth-century Bactrian culture.
Brian Copenhaver is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and History in UCLA’s Departments of Philosophy and History; he also holds the Udvar-Hazy Chair of Philosophy and History. Until June, 2003, he served as a Dean or a Provost for twenty-two years, fifteen of them in the University of California and, most recently, for ten years as Provost of UCLA’s College of Letters and Science. From 2004 until 2011, he directed UCLA’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
His eleven completed books are about Symphorien Champier; the Hermetica; Renaissance philosophy; Polydore Vergil’s On Discovery; medieval logic; Lorenzo Valla’s attack on medieval logic; and modern Italian philosophy. He has published many articles on magic, astrology, the Hermetica, Cabala and their foundations in Neoplatonic, Aristotelian and scholastic philosophy; also on natural philosophy; scepticism; Averroism; philosophical translation; modern Italian philosophy; historiography; the classical tradition in philosophy; Lorenzo Valla; Marsilio Ficino; Giovanni Pico della Mirandola; Lorenzo de’ Medici; Polydore Vergil; Tommaso Campanella; Isaac Newton; Henry More; and Benedetto Croce. Two books are now in production by the publisher: "Peter of Spain, Summaries of Logic: Text, Translation, Introduction and Notes" (Oxford), with Calvin Normore and Terry Parsons; and "Lorenzo Valla, Dialectical Disputations, ‘The I Tatti Renaissance Library’" (Harvard), with Lodi Nauta. Also in press is: "Lorenzo Valla, Scourge of Scholasticism: Nature, Power and Modality in the Dialectical Disputations," Rinascimento.
Anna van den Kerchove studied History and Religion at Paris XII-Créteil and Paris IV-Sorbonne, receiving an MA in History in 1995 and a PhD in Religious Studies in 2006. After teaching history in higher education for a number of years, she is, since 2007, in charge of training and research at the IESR Institut européen en sciences des religions, a division of the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE), in Paris. She is also a member of the CNRS-UMR 8584 (“Laboratoire d’études sur les monotheisms”).
David Porreca
David Porreca is the medievalist in the Classical Studies Department at the University of Waterloo and currently serves as Co-Director of the Undergraduate program in Medieval Studies, as well as the Graduate Officer for the MA in Ancient Mediterranean Cultures. His research interests involve Medieval intellectual history, especially the reception of the pagan Classical tradition in the Christian Middle Ages, but the main focus of his research has been the enigmatic figure of Hermes Trismegistus. He has conducted research at over thirty manuscript libraries scattered throughout Europe and developed interests in ancient and Medieval magic, astrology, alchemy, palaeography, manuscript transmission and glosses.
Gregory Shaw is a professor of Religious Studies at Stonehill College, MA, with interest and expertise in religions of Late Antiquity, specifically the late Platonic and Pythagorean traditions. His book, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (Penn State Press, 1995) shed light on a misunderstood aspect of the later Platonic tradition: the practice of theurgic rituals as a central element of the later Platonic tradition. He has published several articles on Neoplatonic theurgy; his most recent focus on the role of the subtle body, theochêma, in the divinization of the soul. He is a participant in Esalen Institute’s conference on Panentheism and ongoing seminar on the Survival of Bodily Death. He served for six years as the co-chair of the Platonism and Neoplatonism Group of the American Academy of Religion.
Jørgen Podemann Sørensen
Associate professor of History of Religions at the University of Copenhagen. Born 1946, Studies in History of Religions, Egyptology, Assyriology. Books and articles on ancient Egyptian religion, Hermetism, Gnosticism, Ritual, Divination. Editor and author of textbooks in History of Religions.
Christian Wildberg
Christian Wildberg is Professor of Classics at Princeton University. His research focuses on the history of ancient philosophy, esp. the history of Platonism in Late Antiquity. He has also strong interests in Greek literature, especially tragedy, and Greek religion. Main publications: a reconstruction and interpretation of a sixth century anti-Aristotelian treatise, written by the Christian philosopher John Philoponus, and a study of the function of the gods in Euripidean tragedy. Most recently, he has edited volumes on such diverse topics as mysticism, Aristotle's cosmology, and the cult of Dionysus. His current researches focus on the history of Neoplatonism, on the development of the concept of evil in antiquity, and on pseud-epigraphical philosophical letters (Plato, Aristotle), and the Corpus Hermeticum.
Last updated 5/1/12