Staff Profile:Dr Christa Gray
- Name:
- Dr Christa Gray
- Job Title:
- Lecturer in Classics
- Responsibilities:
Dr Gray is on leave from May 2020 to June 2021
Background:
I arrived at the University of Reading in January 2016, after teaching and researching at the Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Oxford (in reverse chronological order).
Areas of interest:
My main focus is on early Christian Latin, specialising on the work of Jerome of Stridon (c. AD 347-420). I am interested in the ways in which fourth-century authors writing in Latin relate to the style and concepts found in earlier, non-Christian works, and how these writers' background and interests influence the development of Latin as a language in the run-up to the Middle Ages. My commentary on Jerome's Life of Malchus came out in February 2015, and I look forward to writing a companion volume on Jerome's Life of Hilarion. Both of these 'biographies' are very good reads and deserve to be more widely known than they currently are. I have enjoyed working this type of text into my teaching here at Reading.
In my role as Research Associate at the Fragments of the Republican Roman Orators project at Glasgow, I have also been working more specifically on the transmission of information about public speech from the Roman Republic in contemporary and later sources. In this context I co-edited two volumes of essay collections, one on Roman Republican Institutions and Ideology (with Catherine Steel and Henriette van der Blom, CUP 2018) and one on Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Reception (with Andrea Balbo, Richard Marshall, and Catherine Steel, OUP 2018).
Research interests:
Latin prose narrative; Latin philology; early Christianity; ancient biography; ancient oratory and rhetoric; reception of Classical forms in late antique literature
Current projects
I am preparing a commentary on Jerome's Life of Hilarion, a very complex and intriguing text which gives us a host of varied information about ordinary and extraordinary people's lives in the Mediterranean world of the fourth century AD. I am also co-editing, together with James Corke-Webster (KCL), a volume of essays which take literary (rather than primarily historical or theological) perspectives in looking at Christian texts about the lives of saints in late antiquity and beyond.
- Areas of Interest:
- Research groups / Centres:
- Publications:
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YNumber of items: 12.
2020
- Gray, C. (2020) How to persuade a saint: supplication in Jerome’s Lives of Holy Men. In: Gray, C. and Corke-Webster, J. (eds.) The Hagiographical Experiment: Developing Discourses of Sainthood. Vigiliae Christianae Supplements. Brill, Leiden.
- Gray, C. and Corke-Webster, J. C. (2020) The hagiographical experiment: developing discourses of sainthood. Vigiliae Christianae Supplements. Brill, Leiden. ISBN 9789004421325
- Corke-Webster, J. and Gray, C. (2020) Introduction. In: Gray, C. and Corke-Webster, J. (eds.) The Hagiographical Experiment: Developing Discourses of Sainthood. Brill. ISBN 9789004421332
2018
- Gray, C. (2018) Jerome, Quintilian and Little Paula: asceticism, education and ideology. In: Stenger, J. R. (ed.) Learning cities in late antiquity: the local dimension of education. Routledge.
- Gray, C., Balbo, A., Marshall, R. M. A. and Steel, C. E. W. , eds. (2018) Reading Republican oratory: reconstructions, contexts, receptions. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp384. ISBN 9780198788201
- Blom, H. v. d., Gray, C. and Steel, C. (2018) Institutions and ideology in Republican Rome: speech, audience and decision. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 9781108429016
- Gray, C., Balbo, A., Marshall, R. M. A. and Steel, C. E. W. (2018) Introduction. In: Gray, C., Balbo, A., Marshall, R. M. A. and Steel, C. E. W. (eds.) Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 1-14. ISBN 9780198788201
- Steel, C., Gray, C. and van der Blom, H. (2018) Introduction. In: van der Blom, H., Gray, C. and Steel, C. (eds.) Institutions and Ideology in Republican Rome: Speech, Audience and Decision. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 1-11. ISBN 9781108681476 doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108681476
2017
- Gray, C. (2017) 'Holy and pleasing to God': a narratological approach to hagiography in Jerome's 'Lives' of Paul and Malchus. Ancient Narrative, 14. pp. 103-128. ISSN 1568-3540 (ISBN: 9789492444172)
2016
- Gray, C. (2016) The emended monk: the Greek translation of Jerome's 'Vita Malchi'. In: De Temmerman, K. and Demoen, K. (eds.) Writing Biography in Greece and Rome. Cambridge University Press, pp. 117-132. ISBN 9781107129122
2015
- Gray, C. (2015) Jerome, Vita Malchi: introduction, text, translation, and commentary. Oxford Classical Monographs. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp384. ISBN 9780198723721
2013
- Gray, C. (2013) The monk and the ridiculous: comedy in Jerome’s 'Vita Malchi'. In: Sixteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies held in Oxford 2011, Oxford, pp. 115-122.
