“Village by Town by City: The Religious Rape Conquest of Neolithic-Derived Civil Societies”
War in Society and Culture Speaker Series
Kathy Gaca (Vanderbilt University)
Kathy L. Gaca (got’-sa) is Associate Professor of Classics and Associate Member of the Divinity School at Vanderbilt University. Her main research interests are Greek and Roman philosophy, mainly Platonic, Stoic, Pythagorean, and Peripatetic ethics; Greek, Roman, and biblical history and social values; Greek biblical traditions (Septuagint and New Testament); and Philonic and patristic ethics. These research areas are all related to her driving interest in historically grounded ethics, that is, concerns of social injustice rooted in antiquity that remain problematic in the present day and need a clearer philosophical and historical understanding. Philology and comparative historical linguistics are among her research tools for approaching ethics historically. She is the author of the award-winning The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity (University of California Press, 2003, winner of a Classical Association [CAMWS] Outstanding Publication Award) and of numerous articles; as well as the co-editor of the well-received essay collection, Paul and the Receptions of Romans (2008). She is finalizing her current book on the religious trajectory of civilian-assault ravaging warfare for conquest to enslave women and girls of targeted peoples. This practice, rooted in the Bronze age, largely state-sponsored, and recognized as problematic by the Peripatetics and Peripatetic-influenced historians and biographers, remains a modern-day crisis of systematic war and gender-based violence and injustice.
Sponsored by:
War in Society and Culture Program
Department of History