Graduate Student, School of Religion
Dennis MacDonald
Andrew Jacobs
About
I am a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Religion at Claremont Graduate University. I received my B.A. in Classical Studies and Religious Studies from UC Riverside, and my M.A. in Religion at Claremont School of Theology. My research interests include ancient literature, ancient religion, the Second Sophistic, and the rhetoric of composition. My dissertation, titled “Acts and the Second Sophistic: The Politics of Imitation and Literary Self-Representation,” explores the literary-rhetorical textures of Acts within the larger cultural world of the Second Sophistic, focusing on the cultural, social, literary, and political dimensions of identity construction in the era of Roman Greece. My dissertation asks how literary-rhetorical methods of composition provide cultural capital for the narrative of Acts, how the narrative imagines and negotiates various identities in the text, how the text both reifies and subverts patterns of imperial power and social dominance during the late first century C.E., and how Acts constructs a vision of the primitive Christian movement that rhetorically maps this history onto the geography of the Roman Empire.
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