The Division of Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley is pleased to announce Professor Duncan MacRae as co-Director of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, effective July 1, 2023.
MacRae is Associate Professor in the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman and specializes in the religious history of the Roman world, particularly in the late Republican and early imperial periods. He has published on the traditional pagan religions of antiquity as well as on Judaism and early Christianity. His first book, Legible Religion, (Harvard University Press, 2016) argues that learned books that were written in the first century BCE by intellectuals like Varro, Cicero, Nigidius Figulus and a cast of Roman elites played an important role in the formation of the concept of “Roman religion”, particularly in the eyes of influential readers like the emperor Augustus and the bishop Augustine.
The Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion (BCSR) is situated within the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry as part of the Division of Arts & Humanities. BCSR advances creative and critical scholarship on religion. BCSR’s public programming, faculty research, and graduate training drives new approaches to the study of religion and its intellectual and material contexts. Through media platforms and engagement with local and global audiences, BCSR fosters critical reflection and public discussion of this innovative work.
Since its founding in 2012, BCSR has become a nexus for interdisciplinary collaboration, uniting leading scholars from an array of disciplines and responding to recent developments in the humanities and social sciences.