Program in Early Cultures

Susan Ashbrook Harvey specializes in late antique and Byzantine Christianity, with Syriac studies as her particular focus. She has published widely on topics relating to asceticism, hagiography, women and gender, hymnography, homiletics, and piety in late antique Christianity. She is presently working on biblical women in Syriac hymnography and homiletics, and the Syriac women's choirs that performed these works. She also continues to work on religion and the senses, in particular on the manner in which sensory rhetoric is used to heighten the emotional aspects of late antique religious texts. Liturgical lament, especially in Syriac and Greek, is another area of her current research.