"After Transformation is a lyrical history of Christian late antiquity as it lives on in and with the present, exploring monumental changes that occurred as Rome transitioned from pagan to Christian worship, and during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. As Maia Kotrosits considers connections between these two eras, she identifies numerous emotional through lines, including "the disorientation and lostness, the attempts to come to grips with grief, mass death, and magnified physical vulnerability, the struggle to understand time and change." These cataclysms, associated then with the increased violence and new ways of thinking about the afterlife when Rome transitioned from pagan to Christian worship, and associated today with the upheaval and uncertainty of the pandemic, serve as defining moments of these periods. This work vividly traces the profound and violent effects of Christian imperialism across time and place. It does this through a collection of lyrical forms ranging from micro-essay to vignette, from poem to fragment. More broadly, it suggests that the mundane and intimate details of our lives can themselves be conduits for historical knowing, even of the supposedly "distant" past. It articulates through historical particulars a phenomenology of the tensions of time, and it attends to the various forms that grief takes in the face of mass death and mundane structural violence. It is about the ironies of the ways history is written, given the ways history is lived"--.
After Transformation : Rewriting Time, Christian Late Antiquity, and the Present