Lives of Objects

Maia Kotrosits is assistant professor of religion at Denison University and author of Rethinking Early Christian Identity: Affect, Violence, and Belonging.

• Introduction1  Objects Made Real: The Art of Description2  Citizens of Fallen Cities: Ruins, Diaspora, and the Material Unconscious3  Histories Unwritten in Stone: The Frustrations of Memorialization 674  Tertullian of Carthage and the Materiality of Power (with Carly Daniel-Hughes)5  The Perils of Translation: Martyrs’ Last Words and the Cultural Materiality of Speech6  Penetration and Its Discontents: Agency, Touch, and Objects of Desire7  Darkening the Discipline: Fantasies of Efficacy and the Art of RedescriptionAcknowledgments  Notes  Bibliography  Index

"[T]he individual interpretations in Kotrosits’s book are elegant and persuasive. The writing is some of the clearest discussion of often opaque theory that I have seen. The warnings to scholars—for example, her position (also argued in her earlier work) that is wrong to use 'Christian' in a discussion of many second century texts—are convincing and apposite. And anyone aspiring to be a 'public intellectual' should be forewarned by the powerful exploration in her final chapter of the dangers of such aspiration. In short, this will be a challenging, even moving, book for scholars in several different fields of the humanities."