My name is Lavinia and I am starting my Marie Curie fellowship at AU this month. I am originally from Rome, but I have lived in England for four years when I completed my PhD at the University of Nottingham. For the past two years I have lived in Italy where I taught History and History of Philosophy in Italian high schools and worked as Adjunct Lecturer at the Patristic Augustinian Institute in Rome. Besides this, I have been happily married for two and half years!

My project is called “Origen on Gender” (OriGen) and aims to investigate to what extent Origen of Alexandria used the feminine as an intellectual category, that is, as a rhetorical and literary code for expressing theological doctrines. The majority of studies on women and gender have only marginally discussed the works of such a renown third century theologian, since Origen does not fit the dichotomous paradigm of research in this field, traditionally divided between “gender studies” and “women’s studies”. Rather, he employed the feminine as a philosophical and theological category to express his Trinitarian, anthropological and ecclesiological doctrines. My project wants: a) to identify and list all the occurrences in which the feminine is employed as an intellectual category in Origen’s literary production; b) to contextualize these passages within Origen’s overall theology; c) identify antecedent traditions which held similar beliefs about the feminine and from which Origen could have drawn. My sincere hope is that this project will encourage future research on this topic.

Contact:

Lavinia Cerioni
Institut for Kultur og Samfund
Jens Chr. Skous Vej 3
8000 Aarhus C

lav.cer@cas.au.dk