The unit plans to have five sessions at the 2024 meeting. Two thematic sessions and an open call for papers, and two co-sponsored book review panels:
1) At least one open session welcoming paper proposals on any aspect of health and disability related to the Bible.
2) A session which invites papers aspects related to old age, aging, gerontology and ancient geriatrics, including papers that engage with critical-theoretical approaches and methodologies related to old age in antiquity.
3) A thematic panel will focus on pragmatic texts and practical approaches in the area of healing, healthcare and related subjects (e.g. magic, astro-medicine, divination, dream interpretation). So, contributions may deal with recipe collections, handbooks or compendia (euporista, vade mecum etc.) proper or with the integration of respective knowledge into other, not necessarily medical works such as biblical, rabbinic, early Christian, Manichean, Irano-Persian, Islamic traditions or other texts (e.g. marginalia, miscellaneous manuscripts). Papers can explore their materiality, discursive strategies (recipes, lists, practical advice, narratives), authors and audiences (“users”?), purposes and socio-political or cultural backgrounds.
4) An invited book review panel (co-sponsored with the Religious Competition in Late Antiquity Unit) will engage Megan Nutzman’s Contested Cures: Identity and Ritual Healing in Roman and Late Antique Palestine (Edinburgh University Press 2022). The book argues for religious intersection and cross-fertilization in the realm of ritual healing, and asks about what this meant for the communal identity of Jews, Samaritans, Christians, Greeks and Romans in late antique Palestine.
5) A co-sponsored session reviewing Isaac T. Soon, A Disabled Apostle: Impairment and Disability in the Letters of Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).