“Shifting Visions: Earthquake Rituals in Constantinople between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages”
Mark Roosien (ISM Fellow 2019–2020) comes to the ISM from the University of Notre Dame, where he has held a Mellon post-doctoral teaching fellowship since receiving his Ph.D. in theology there in December 2018. He is a scholar of liturgical and ritual studies, focusing on Christianity in Late Antiquity. At Yale, he will revise and expand his dissertation “The Liturgical Commemoration of Earthquakes in Late Antique Constantinople: At the Intersection of Ritual, Environment, and Empire,” analyzing the rite in historical and political contexts to expand the understanding of the formation of Constantinople’s stational liturgy, of time and the cosmos in the Byzantine Rite, and of the role of the liturgy in the political rise of Constantinople as the Roman capital in the East.