Brent D. Shaw will be presenting at the Seminar in Cultural History on Wednesday, April 13 at 6 pm. His talk is entitled “Bringing Back The Sheaves: Agrarian Life and Material Culture in Late Antique Africa.”

Brent D. Shaw is the Andrew Fleming West Professor of Classics at Princeton University. He received his doctorate in Ancient History and Classics from Cambridge University in 1978. His most recent books are Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine (Cambridge University Press, 2011), for which he received the Wallace J. Ferguson prize of the Canadian Historical Association for best book in history; and Bringing in the Sheaves: Economy and Metaphor in the Roman World (University of Toronto Press, 2013). He received the Berman Award in the Humanities from Princeton University (2015), and is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society.

At Bard Graduate Center, Shaw will reexamine his book Bringing in the Sheaves: Economy and Metaphor in the Roman World. The larger study was an attempt to understand the relationship between basic economic activities (in this case the harvesting of cereal grains), instruments and social practices on the one hand and modes of human thinking on the other—in particular metaphorical thinking.