Archives for April 2016

UMW Certamen 2016 Results

The UMW Classics Club and the department of Classics, Philosophy, and Religion welcomed eight teams to UMW Certamen 2016 this past weekend!  The results are as follows: Level One - 1st Ni River Middle, 2nd Massaponax High School Level One-A - 1st Spotsylvania Middle, 2nd Ni River Middle School Level two 1st Riverbend High School A team, 2nd Riverbend High School B team Level three 1st Riverbend High School, 2nd Brooke Point High school Upper level 1st Riverbend High School, 2nd Massaponax High school Congratulations to all those who participated! For those of you who attended, please take a moment to fill out our survey.  And keep an eye out for Certamen 2017 in March!   … [Read more...]

Religion alum defends Ph.D. Thesis!

CPR alum and religion major Jef Pierce successfully defended his PhD dissertation at UVA today. Here is some info from his page on the UVA dept website: Jef's Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “Exaltation of the Goddess: Narrative Expressions of the Feminine Divine in the Devīpurāṇa,” focuses on a subgroup of medieval devotional texts in which the Goddess is for the first time acknowledged as supreme within the Sanskrit Brahmanical milieu. By considering the intertextual relationships of the previously untranslated Devīpurāṇa – a foundational and influential Śākta text – and by drawing out the Tantric elements of the work, his research demonstrates the ways in which the text inherits an orthodox narrative vocabulary but reinvents it for an innovative vision of reality colored by local/indigenous considerations of the powerful feminine divine. … [Read more...]