How did this book project begin?  

With brilliant, supportive teachers. While a student at Brown, I had the good fortune to be working with my supervisor, Stratis Papaioannou, on Gregory of Nazianzus, the fourth-century Cappadocian Father, when I enrolled in a seminar on Ancient Greek literary criticism with Johanna Hanink. That conjunction of luminaries led to a conference paper on the role of what ancient literary theorists called “enargeia”—the linguistic quality of quickening vividness in discourse—in Gregory’s oration for Pentecost. That grew into an idea for a dissertation on the festal orations he delivered in Constantinople more generally, and then ultimately into a book on Gregory’s performance of philosophy in these texts. The book traces where those ideas are coming from, how they are put to use, and how they shape the subsequent development of Byzantine literary traditions.            

What would you like your readers to learn from this book?

The book arose out of a sense of wonder I felt at the idea that this figure, who is familiar to history as a Church Father and a decisively influential theologian, began his career with a long Athenian apprenticeship training to become what today we would call a professor of Greek literature. I would be delighted if readers of the book can experience some of that wonder for themselves.