麻豆传媒

Springfield, Ohio 鈥� The recipient of three impactful grants and awards in the span of less than 12 months, Assistant Professor of Religion Travis Proctor is on a roll 鈥� and he plans to make the most of it.

Proctor, who joined 麻豆传媒鈥檚 faculty prior to the 2019-20 school year, was honored with a pair of awards and a prestigious grant in recent months. Taken together, these achievements represent several years of Proctor鈥檚 research, including awards honoring his dissertation at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 2017 and an article that will be published soon by a national academic journal, in addition to a grant that will support research plans for his next major book project.

鈥淚鈥檓 very honored to have received these awards,鈥� Proctor said. 鈥淎bove all, it makes me feel very fortunate to have been able to learn from excellent mentors, colleagues, and students, including those I鈥檝e gotten to know at 麻豆传媒 this year.

Proctor received the Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise, administered by the Research Center for International and Interdisciplinary Theology at Heidelberg University. The award recognizes his work on his Ph.D. dissertation titled 鈥淩ulers of the Air: Demonic Bodies and the Making of the Ancient Christian Cosmos鈥� (UNC-Chapel Hill, 2017). Proctor said his dissertation 鈥渢raced how early Christian authors (ca. 50-300 CE) formulated their understandings of the divine and humanity in tandem with their ideas regarding malevolent spiritual entities (e.g., demons, evil spirits), such that ideas concerning demons came to play a major role in shaping early Christian identity and practice.鈥�

Proctor also recently received the A.R. Pete Diamond Award for Integrative Scholarship from the Society of Biblical Literature for an article he wrote titled 鈥淎 Cartography of Kinship: Domestic Space, Tomb Cult, and the Re-Mapping of Ephesus in the Acts of John,鈥� set to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Early Christian Studies. The award recognizes 鈥渏unior scholars demonstrating innovative approaches in biblical studies that advance methodological work at the intersection of historical criticism, critical theory, and cultural studies.鈥�

鈥淚n this article, I explore how the Acts of John (a second century 鈥渁pocryphal鈥� account of the miracles of St. John) formulated a kind of imagined religious 鈥渕ap鈥� of the cities of the ancient Mediterranean, with a particular focus on the ancient city of Ephesus,鈥� Proctor said. 鈥淚 note in particular that the Acts of John centered its activities within the home as well as the tomb, two sites that operated as important Christian meeting spaces in the early centuries of the Common Era.鈥�

His latest achievement is a grant that will support research for a book he is writing, tentatively titled Multispecies and Posthuman Perspectives on the Body of Jesus in Early Christianity (ca. 50-300 CE). The grant will fund a teaching sabbatical for the 2020-21 academic year.

Proctor says his book 鈥渟eeks to show early Christian understandings of Jesus, including in the Bible as well as other early Christian texts, portrayed Jesus using a variety of nonhuman entities, including as an angel, an animal (e.g., the lamb of God), and even a plant (e.g., 鈥淚 am the vine and you are the branches鈥�).鈥�

鈥淪uch images are significant, I argue, because they show how nonhuman nature and the environment have played an important role in Christian culture from its very beginnings; this is important, in turn, because many Christian communities today are grappling with how to respond to the mounting environmental challenges such as global warming,鈥� Proctor added.

Proctor specializes in religions of the ancient Mediterranean, with a focus on histories of Christian cultures in the ancient world (ca. 50-500 CE). His teaching emphasizes critical, experiential learning that connects historical issues with topics of contemporary significance, including connections between ancient forgeries and modern 鈥渇ake news,鈥� historical and contemporary notions of gender/sexuality, and the interactions between religious cultures and human treatment of the environment.