Dr. Sean Hannan

Some time ago, Valla McLean at MacEwan Libraries posted a new & updated page devoted to the work being done in the Digital Humanities here at MacEwan. If you click on the link, you’ll find a list of ongoing projects covering both research and pedagogy, with a special focus on the disciplines of Classics, English, and History.

The site also features some deeper dives into specific examples of pedagogy informed by the Digital Humanities, ranging from podcasting and app-creation to mapping, timelines, and quantitative textual analysis. I was fortunate enough to get the chance to contribute a couple of pieces to Valla’s page, including one on Villanova’s app-version of Augustine’s Confessions and another on how best to go about quantitatively measuring student feedback regarding assignments designed in light of Digital Humanities pedagogy.   

This is just a quick update to post a photo I received recently from Valentino Gasparini, one of the organizers of last week’s successful conference on Lived Ancient Religion in North Africa, held at Madrid’s Universidad Carlos III. After sharing our talks on the life & afterlife of Augustine of Hippo, we four intrepid presenters fielded a series of thoughtful questions from the audience. A productive exchange was then enjoyed by all.

I’m happy to report that last week’s Lived Ancient Religion in North Africa conference went off without a hitch. Hosted by the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid and organized by Valentino Gasparini & Maria Fernandez Portaencasa,  the event gathered archaeologists alongside historians of both the material & textual records in order to better understand ‘religion’ as lived praxis in Roman Africa, Numidia, & Mauretania. Here’s a link to LARNA’s FB page, from which the above image was taken.

My paper, “Optatus of Milevis & the Improvisation of Universalism,” sought to read Optatus’ anti-Donatist writings as an example of lived religion and improvisatory praxis in late antiquity. While Augustine of Hippo is usually (& not wrongly) regarded as the theorist of Christian universalism against the Donatists, Optatus pre-dates Augustine as a universalizing force in North Africa. Unlike Augustine, however, Optatus does not begin with theory & end with praxis; instead, he begins with the practical situation & arrives at his universalist commitments on that concrete basis, thereby more effectively speaking universalism into existence for his audience.

Eventually, the conference proceedings will be coming out with Brill. The next task for me, then, is to turn this 20-minute talk into a more substantive chapter, perhaps by elaborating on the methodology of “lived religion” as articulated by Jörg Rüpke in light of the work of Michel de Certeau.

To my pleasant surprise, I was just informed that my piece on the ‘specious present’ in William James & Augustine has already been published in the journal Consensus (40.2). Check it out here! (But beware Brentano in the margins…)

This is the end-result of my research efforts this summer in support of the 2019 Cheiron conference on the history of psychology & the behavioural sciences, which was hosted here at MacEwan University in Edmonton. Thanks go out again to Nancy Digdon, Michael Dawson, & the rest of the Cheiron team. It was great to get out of my Augustinian comfort zone, if only for a little while.

There are a number of other cool pieces in this edition of Consensus, as well. Check out the full table of contents here.

I’m happy to announce that my entry in Bloomsbury’s Reading Augustine series is now available for pre-order! Its title is On Time, Change, History, & Conversion.

My goal in this book is to provide a reader-friendly entry into the complexities of Augustine of Hippo’s philosophy of time. In line with the spirit of the Bloomsbury series, I’ve aimed to put Augustine into conversation with modern realist theories about time, twentieth-century debates in the physics of space-time, & twenty-first-century attitudes about “progress.” As a result, there should be something for just about everyone in there somewhere.

Here are some screenshots of the Table of Contents, just to provide a better idea of what’s in store:

This past August, I delivered research talks at Oxford University and the University of Aarhus in Denmark. The first was entitled “The Enforcement of Violence & the Force of Love in Augustine: Epistle 93 & its Aftermath,” while the second was called “Love as a Violent Force in Augustine & Hannah Arendt.”

The papers were spiritual siblings: the first explained the short-term effects of Augustine of Hippo’s fifth-century call for coercive force to be used in the maintenance of community among North African Christians, using maternal love as a model. The second then linked Augustine’s views up with modern debates in political theory about the proper relationship between the use of coercive force and the rhetoric of love.

Special thanks go out to the organizers of Oxford’s International Conference on Patristic Studies & especially Anthony Dupont (KU Leuven) for running the colloquium on “Emotions & Rhetoric in Augustine.” At Aarhus, I’m indebted to Miriam DeCock & Jakob Engberg of the Centre for the Study of Ancient Christianity. I’m hoping to get back to Denmark soon and am cautiously optimistic that a brief version of the argument I debuted in these papers will be included in a future edition of Studia Patristica.

I’m going to go ahead & call the Cheiron 2019 conference at MacEwan University a success. Even as an outsider to the history of psychology & the behavioural sciences, I was welcomed in a spirit of collegiality. My paper on the ‘specious present’ in Augustine & William James, meanwhile, received a good deal of constructive feedback, which should allow me to keep working the piece up to a higher level of historical & argumentative precision. Thanks, again, to the Cheiron community!