Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity

The Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity (CSLA) fosters interdisciplinary discussion and cooperation among University members who study the period extending from 200 to 800 CE in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

Comprised of specialists in history, classics, religion, art and archaeology, and Near Eastern studies, the CSLA provides a forum for discussion among students, faculty, visiting scholars, and members of the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton Theological Seminary. The committee also organizes a program of public lectures, often in collaboration with other departments and programs.

The CSLA is under the aegis of the Council of the Humanities.


Upcoming Events

Lecture: Jamie Kreiner, "Good Music and Bad Music in Late Antiquity"
Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

Christians were debating the aesthetics and morality of music more than a millennium and a half before the Satanic panic. But their debates weren't solely or even mostly about the putatively demonic properties of music. They were also anchored in the conviction that music had serious psychological and behavioral ramifications, and this talk…

Speaker

Announcements

Peter R. Brown Prize

Applications are now Closed. 

We would like to invite applications for this year’s Peter R. Brown Prize.
 
The Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity sponsors the annual Peter R. Brown Prize for the best graduate student essay on any…

“A Hidden World Revealed: The Palimpsests of Saint Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai” synaxis and workshops cosponsored by the Seeger Center 

 Twelve hundred years ago, a scribe in a secluded monastery took a piece of parchment laboriously inscribed with a religious text—and erased it.

Parchment was scarce in the Egyptian desert during the medieval era, prompting the erasure and reuse of manuscripts.

Beneath the new writing, however, traces of the original…