Biography
Laura Roesch is a doctoral candidate focusing on the late antique Mediterranean. Her dissertation, “A Fine Spray of Blood”: Martyrdom, Violence, and Sacred Landscapes in the Late Antique Mediterranean, explores historical processes of Christianization in the late-fourth and early-fifth-century Roman Empire, specifically through intersections between memorialized violent martyrdom and cultural constructions of sacred landscapes. She argues that a flexible poetics of violence played a vital role in creatively Christianizing late ancient social imaginaries. Laura spent the 2019-2020 academic year as a graduate fellow of the University of Tennessee’s Humanities Center, and was a recipient of the University of Tennessee’s Thomas Fellowship to support her dissertation research in 2019-2020. She also received the Claude Robertson Award for Excellence in European History from the University of Tennessee Department of History in 2020.
Research
Late Antiquity, Early Christianity, Violence, Martyrdom, Landscape, Memory, Late Antique PoetryEducation
Ph.D. Candidate, History, University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2021 projected graduation) M.A., History, University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2015) B.A., History, Classics, University of Colorado, Boulder (2012, magna cum laude)