ISAW Library hosts Candida Moss

The ISAW Library's second public lecture of the year saw Prof. Candida Moss speak to another packed lecture hall on October 7, 2025, on the theme of "Invisible Hands: The Hidden Labor Behind Ancient Texts and Libraries." 

The Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology in the University of Birmingham and a research associate at ISAW, Prof. Moss is one of the most important scholars and historians working in the New Testament and Early Christianity today. She devoted her presentation to ways in which we, at the remove of more than a millennium, may recover the (often intentionally) hidden labor that made the ancient literary world possible.Drawing from her research from her most recent, award-winning book, God's Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible (2024, Little, Brown and Co.), Prof. Moss revealed how enslaved scribes, copyists, and curators were essential to the production, preservation, and dissemination of the texts we now regard as sacred or canonical. 

The next event in the ISAW Library lecture series will be Sitta von Reden on Nov. 6, 2025, who will who promises to deliver a provocative lecture entitled, "Beyond the Silk Road: Or, Why One Rhinoceros Fewer from India Would Not Have Hurt the Ancient Economy." More information and registration is available via this link.

Here is a sneak preview ...

Prof. von Reden will offer alternative ways of thinking about why we find Chinese silk in Palmyra, Egyptian glass vessels in Afghanistan, and Roman coins in Thailand and Vietnam. Using insights from empire and frontier-zone research, as well as concepts of cultural economics, she will argue for a more layered understanding of exchange patterns across Eurasian empires. Wherever we look, we find different reasons for the transaction of different quantities and kinds of goods, and different social groups and exchange mechanisms were involved in their movement and production. In collapsing these differences into "routes" and "trade," we risk letting colonial ideas creep into our understanding of ancient imperial entanglement. What did the Roman consumption of Indian pepper have to do with the Han emperors’ craving for rhinoceroses from Sri Lanka? Identifying several transactional forces and frontiers, Prof. von Reden will offer us a much richer story of trans-imperial exchanges than the traditional narrative of the Silk Road has to tell.