Across the Corrupting Sea

Cavan Concannon is an Assistant Professor of Religion in the School of Religion at the University of Southern California. He previously held an ACLS Fellowship in the Department of Religion at Duke University and a postdoctoral fellowship at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and participated in excavations at Ostia and Corinth. Cavan completed his PhD in New Testament and Early Christianity at Harvard University. His research takes a trans-disciplinary approach to early Christianity, integrating philology, philosophy, critical theory, and material culture to explore questions of connectivity, identity, and the creation of communities across time and space. His first book, 'When You Were Gentiles': Specters of Ethnicity in Roman Corinth and Paul's Corinthian Correspondence, was published in 2014. Other work has appeared in the Harvard Theological Review, The Journal of Biblical Literature, and several edited volumes. His future research explores the correspondence of Dionysus of Corinth as a lens into the development of early Christian communities. Lindsey A. Mazurek is a PhD candidate and J.B. Duke Fellow at Duke University in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies. Her dissertation, 'Globalizing the Sculptural Landscape of the Isis and Sarapis Cults in Hellenistic and Roman Greece', examines the ways that devotee communities used sculptures to explore cultural and religious questions in Egyptian sanctuaries. She holds an MA from Duke in Art History and a BA in Classical Languages from the University of California at Berkeley. Her research focuses on cross-cultural connectivity and ancient imperialism, particularly on the ways that local communities understood and interpreted their relationships with disparate cultures across the Mediterranean. She has excavated at Mycenae and the Athenian Agora. She has presented her research across Europe and the United States, and has published in the Journal of Roman Archaeology.

• Introduction: a new connectivity for the 21st century / Part 1 Cabotage and Seascapes in the Eastern Mediterranean: Beyond Braudel: network models and a Samothracian seascape, Blakely / Material and textual narratives of authenticity? Creating cabotage and memory in the Hellenistic eastern Mediterranean, Mazurek / Part II Markets, Connectivity, and the Movement of Religious Texts: Early Christian connectivity and ecclesial assemblages in Ignatius of Antioch, Concannon / Networks of influence: reconsidering Braudel in archaic Corinth, Ziskowski / Toward a ‘text-market’ approach to early Christianity, Smith / Part III Contesting the Longue Durée: To obey by land and sea: empires, the Mediterranean, and cultural identity in Hellenistic and Roman Cyprus, Gordon / Imperial surplus and local tastes: a comparative study of Mediterranean connectivity and trade, Caraher and Pettegrew / Subverting Braudel in Dalmatia: religion, landscape, and cultural mediation in the hinterland of the eastern Adriatic, Dzino / Index.