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Kevin L. Osterloh, an assistant professor of ancient history at Miami University, has been awarded a $30,000 grant from the Loeb Classical Library Foundation for his project “Virtuous Sons of Abraham: Judean Identity in a Hellenistic World Under Rome,” which he plans to turn into a book.
This project, according to Osterloh, makes important contributions to both the study of Judea and the Mediterranean in the Hellenistic period (323-31 BCE), and to current cross-disciplinary conversations on issues of ethnicity, identity and discourse, and multiculturalism and empire.
It constitutes the first attempt to deal with the impact of Rome on Hellenistic Judea on a cultural and diplomatic-military level. It breaks through the binary methodology often employed in cultural studies of the period (Hellenism versus native culture) by exposing a shared conversation between Judeans, Romans, and Greeks on the nature of identity within the Hellenistic Oikoumenê, or inhabited earth.
“This project counters the recent trend to downplay the significance of cultural exchange in the Hellenistic period by demonstrating the impact of intercommunal contacts on local Judean self-conceptions,” Osterloh said. “It deepens our understanding of Judean cultural production, enhancing the scholarly conversation between the fields of Biblical studies, classics and Jewish studies.”
Osterloh has published and co-edited several articles since coming to Miami in 2007. The grant for the 2009-2010 academic year will allow him to finish his project, which began in his dissertation at Princeton University. The Loeb Classical Library Foundation is a prestigious philanthropy associated with the Loeb Classical Library publication series of ancient Greek and Latin texts at the Harvard University Press.
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