Derek Krueger
As a historian of Christian culture in Late Antiquity and Byzantium, I have posed a variety of questions about the practice of Christianity in the pre-modern Eastern Mediterranean. My most recent monograph, Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East (2004), explores how Christian literature both reflects and shapes Christian ideas about holiness, society, and literature itself. I charted how the authors of various early Christian saints' lives and hymns understood the work of authorship as a Christian religious activity. More recently, I have edited a volume on lay Christian practice in Byzantium. Now I am working concurrently on two projects. The first explores how the culture of monasticism in Byzantium produced ideas about masculinity, gender, sexuality, and friendship. The second uncovers the role of religious ritual in the formation of ideas about the self in Byzantium from the sixth to the ninth century. This project, on what I call "the liturgical formation of identity," uses both literary and material evidence to reconstruct lay patterns of self-reflection and self-regard, including the patterning of the moral conscience.