New MSCA Individual Fellow Maria Dell'Isola to start at CML in September 2019
Maria Dell'Isola's project is entitled "Eschatological time as women’s time? Gendered temporality and female holiness in Early Christianity and Byzantium.”
CML is pleased to announce that our third Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellow, Maria Dell’Isola, will start at SDU in September 2019. Maria is currently a postdoc at the University of Turin, and will be working with Aglae Pizzone on project titled “Eschatological time as women’s time? Gendered temporality and female holiness in Early Christianity and Byzantium.”
Maria’s research investigates the nexus between time and the construction of the feminine in Late Antique and Byzantine hagiographical discourses. By looking both at ways time is experienced through the body and construed by society and religion her project engages with a highly debated problem in Byzantine studies: why did female saints progressively disappear over the Byzantine millennium? Maria will look at stories about women saints produced between the 2nd and the 13th century CE using narratology to analyze how patterns of temporalities are inscribed in the texts. She builds on feminist phenomenology to highlight the persistence of strategies used to control women’s time within patriarchal social orders. Maria will work with medieval sources reflecting on the dialectics between integration/assimilation, minority/majority cultures, gender/societal values all of them of major concern in modern societies. In doing so her research will raise awareness about the ways gendered discourses of time have historically been used to promote lifestyles that ultimately have less to do with women’s empowerment and more with power struggles between competing social groups.