Caraher’s Corinthian Peripheries

It’s the first day of classes for the spring 2024 semester. As usual, I’m pretty excitedabout the startof classes, but I’m also satisfied that I got some work done over winter break.

First, I’ve produced a more or less complete draft of my paper on the Corinthian Periphery during the Roman period for some or another German volume on Early Christian Corinth. It was nice to dig back into some of the scholarship on the Roman period landscape of the Corinthia and try to produce some kind of synthesis. At the same time, it feels a bit like a “mediocre master’s thesis.”

I particularly struggled with what to cite. There’s so much scholarship on the Corinthia that I could have burned through a good bit of my word count in the footnotes. At the same time, I feel like the notes that I did include showed my “citational politics.” There was a clear bias toward “past and current Isthmians” (i.e. Caraher, Gebhard, Gregory, Pettegrew, Rothaus, and Rife) to the exclusion of folks who have worked on Roman material elsewhere on the Isthmus. I also tended to cite English language and synthetic works at the expense of excavation reports and Greek scholarship. This was a bit more deliberate as I imagined the audience for a volume like this is less interested in archaeology qua archaeology and more interested in gaining a better appreciation for the region. 

In any event, since whenever two people who work on the Corinthia are in the same room, there’s almost certainly some kind of beef (or at least delicious Peloponnesian pork), I suspect that some of my regular readers will find unforgivable omissions, glaring misstatements, and errors that reflect my true character.

I would, as always, appreciate any feedback, citations, and corrections. 

Here’s a prepublication copy: Caraher’s Corinthian Periphery.