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Assistant Professor
4163 Thayer Academic Building
Office Location(s): 4163 Thayer Bldg. Phone: 734.615.2960 Fax: 734.936.2679 emuehlbe@umich.edu
About My work is focused on the history of Christianity in time period known as “late antiquity,” roughly 300 C.E. to 700 C.E., and I am particularly interested in the rhetorical and historiographical methods Christians adopted as Christian culture shifted from being in the minority to being dominant in the later Roman Empire.
My current project, Angels in Late Ancient Christianity, explores the variety of ideas Christians had about angels in the fourth and fifth centuries and explains how those ideas were related to two emergent discourses of late ancient piety. One, adopted by Christians who practiced the arts of contestation, especially in the interpretation of texts and the explanation of culture, imagined angels to be well-contained and well-defined divine entities without agency. The other, adopted by Christians who sought cultivation through disciplined intellectual and bodily practice, imagined angels to be one entity among many in a large, shifting collection of divine beings. These two discourses were related to the social environments in which they were conceived, but they also communicated with other environments, shaping the ideas and practices of Christians in ways that were both novel and have remained obscure to historians. I’ve begun thinking about a second project on the way notions of death changed in the Christian imagination during late antiquity.
I teach introductory undergraduate courses on Christianity, as well as advanced undergraduate and graduate courses on Christianity in late antiquity, Gnosticism, asceticism, and theories of historiography. I also teach language courses for undergraduates and graduates in Greek, Coptic, and Syriac.
View Ellen Muehlberger's CV.
