As part of the Summer Papyrological Institute hosted by Brigham Young University, Roger S. Bagnall, professor of ancient history and director of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, will give a public lecture Tuesday, June 28, at 6 to 7 p.m. in B192 Joseph F. Smith Building.
His lecture titled “The Arrival of Christianity in an Egyptian Oasis: Religion at the Dakhla Oasis in the Roman Period” is open to the public and the university community.
He is the editor of “The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology” and co-founder of the multi-university consortium of papyrus collections online called the Advanced Papyrological Information System. Previous to his time at NYU, he was a professor of Greek, Latin and history at Columbia University, where he taught for 33 years.
Besides the editions of many volumes of papyri and other ancient texts, Bagnall's best-known works are “Egypt in Late Antiquity,” “The Demography of Roman Egypt,” “Reading Papyri, Writing Ancient History,” and his Sather lectures entitled “Everyday Writing in the Graeco-Roman East.”
Educated at Yale University and the University of Toronto, Bagnall specializes in the social and economic history of Hellenistic, Roman and Late Antique Egypt.
During the Summer Papyrological Institute, ten young international scholars will study papyrology for six weeks with faculty from BYU and eight senior scholars who will visit from other universities from the U.S. and Europe. The overarching topic for this year’s institute is the study of Roman Egypt. Resources in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections of the Harold B. Lee Library will be augmented by a loan of unique papyrus documents from the University of California-Berkeley's Bancroft Library.
The institute is hosted by BYU with the invitation of the American Society of Papyrologists. Generous support for visiting participants and faculty has been granted by BYU's Council on Religious Education, the Neal A. Maxwell Institute, the College of Religious Education, and the College of Humanities.
For more information about the lecture or the institute, contact Roger Macfarlane at (801) 422-2826 or e-mail macfarlane@byu.edu.
Writer: Mel Gardner
