PIMSPontifical Institute
of
Mediaeval Studies

Catherine Conybeare, Professor of Classics at Mawr College, is this year's John Bennett Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Institute and the Centre for Mediaeval Studies. A specialist in late antiquity and the history of early Christian culture, she received her doctorate from the Centre in 1997. She is the author of Paulinus Noster: Self and Symbols in the Letters of Paulinus of Nola (2000) and The Irrational Augustine (2006), as well as, most recently, The Laughter of Sarah (2013). Her essays and articles are informed by historical scholarship and by contemporary theory; they cover a remarkably wide range of subjects, from ideas of memory to the history of emotions and the space of violence, probing in the process diverse works by Tertullian, Prudentius, Augustine, Avitus, among many others. She will deliver the 2014 O'Donnell Lecture, as well as another public lecture this term, both centred or eccentrically focused on Augustine.