Blossom Gordana Champlain

I trained in historical religious studies with a focus on ascetic knowledge cultures among Egyptian monks, asking in my first book about how reading served as part of ascetic practice, and in my second about how reading served to organize one's relationship to knowledge from the past and to a new future. This led to an ongoing fascination with interactions between texts, bodies, times and places which continues to inform my work on feminist historiography and how patriarchy and colonialism have shaped the archives and institutions on which many modern scholarly disciplines are based.

I am currently working on a third monograph called Men & Books, which takes the discovery of the Tura Papyri as a case study through which to explore how the extraction, possession and seclusion of ancient manuscripts was vital to the identity of male elites in modern Europe. This is in line with an ongoing interest in masculinity and intellectual history, and in unresolved questions of epistemic justice, given a history of the exclusion of feminized and racialized thinkers.

My teaching at MF focuses mainly on method and theory in religious studies and textual studies, and on gender.