DIRECTOR’S BOOKSHELF
An Agora of Ideas
Seeger Center Director Dimitri Gondicas in conversation with
Mark Letteney
The Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies supports Princeton graduate students and postdoctoral and visiting fellows who conduct research at the University on Hellenic studies topics. Alumni and former fellows have published hundreds of books and thousands of articles. Their scholarship reflects the broad, interdisciplinary nature of Hellenic studies, spanning fields from history to religion to literature and periods from antiquity to the present.
In the February 28, 2025, edition of Director’s Bookshelf, Seeger Center Director Dimitri Gondicas speaks with Mark Letteney about The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity: Intellectual and Material Transformations, published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. Letteney is an assistant professor of history at the University of Washington. He earned a Ph.D. in religion at Princeton in 2020 and received a Stanley J. Seeger graduate prize.
How did this book project begin?
This project began as many first books do — as a dissertation, which started in Princeton and was written in large part during fellowship years in Rome and Athens. The book has evolved since then, but it remains an attempt to answer an old question — “what difference did imperial Christianity make in late Roman society?” — with a new method. Scholars have found illuminating answers in shifting social mores and growing confessional communities during the late ancient period, and I build on earlier work. Still, I endeavored to describe the rise of Christianity without attending to questions of belief. My book argues that the impact of imperial Christianity can be traced not only in what people who lived during late antiquity believed but in how those scholars thought — in the form of argumentation and the format of books produced by scholars working far afield from theology, in the domains of law, history, and even military science and the emerging genre of Talmud.
Please share some highlights from your experience as a doctoral candidate at the Seeger Center.
My introduction to the Seeger Center came in a letter for admission to the doctoral program at Princeton, specifying a prize meant to aid my transition and the beginning of my studies. Little did I know that Seeger Center events would become an organizing principle of my four years in Princeton, with visiting lectures and workshops punctuating the regular rhythm set by Hellenic Studies lunch on Mondays during term time. Scheide Caldwell House became a second home on campus: a space of constant scholarly exchange where I could sit with familiar colleagues and meet new ones. You never know who you’ll end up speaking with or what turns your conversation might take. Politics sometimes turned to epigraphy, and campus goings-on turned into an interesting new article, the beginnings of a reading group, or a new friendship. The only constant was that walking through the door was the entrance to a (intellectual) feast.
How did participating in the Seeger Center’s interdisciplinary academic community impact your work?
My work is robustly interdisciplinary and steadfastly collaborative; the Seeger Center modeled what such a career could look like. Graduate school can be an isolating environment, and the humanities can tend toward solipsism. The Seeger Center promotes interdisciplinary dialogue by incentivizing conversation among people with sometimes only loosely related interests. “Hellenic studies” is a broad and amorphous framework, touching a startling variety of Princetonians whose worlds intersect sometimes fundamentally and sometimes only tangentially. Putting us together, and offering a focal point for conversation, forced me to learn how to talk across disciplines and to see the immense value in doing so. The best part of my Princeton career was moving within a bustling intellectual environment, of which the Seeger Center is an important constituent part.
What would you like your readers to learn?
If the analysis is effective, various readers will take different lessons. For historians of late antiquity, I hope to show that methods from the history of science and book history can be productively applied to our archives, with sometimes surprising results. For folks focused on Roman imperial history, I hope to offer a new vantage point on the ‘rise’ of Christianity. For scholars in manuscript studies, I hope to demonstrate that epistemic ruptures can be profitably traced in material evidence.
A transformative journey to Greece inspired Stanley J. Seeger to found Hellenic studies programs at Princeton. Please tell us about a journey that expanded your intellectual horizons or influenced your research.
I have just finished my second book, which is co-authored with Matthew D. C. Larsen and offers a synthetic account of practices, experience, and ideologies of incarceration in the ancient Mediterranean basin. The book began in a series of conversations Matthew and I had and came to fruition during a 2019 trip to Algeria to sites we suspected may have had a carceral function in antiquity. That trip yielded an article, a project, and a book — all built on a hunch, an ambitious itinerary, and generous funding from Princeton University. Our trip was invigorating, exhausting, frustrating, and singularly delightful.
Photo of Dimitri Gondicas by Sameer A. Khan/Fotobuddy. Photo of Mark Letteney by Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong.
Open access edition of The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity.
To read previous Director’s Bookshelf interviews, please visit our archive.
To learn more about books by members of the Princeton Seeger Center academic community, please visit our Publications page.