Bio

Jessica Wright is Assistant Professor of Classics and Medical Humanities at UTSA. She is a historian of the body. She studies representations of the brain and mental experience in the philosophical, medical, and theological texts of late antiquity. Although trained in the literature of Greek and Roman antiquity, she conducts her research in conversation with contemporary philosophy and history of science and medicine. She is currently writing a book titled The Care of the Brain in Early Christianity.

When she is not immersed in the ancient world, she reads about the future and other alternate realities (she particularly recommends the work of N.K. Jemison and Octavia Butler). Before moving to San Antonio, she had lived in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, China, and New Zealand. Originally she is from Yorkshire, England.      

Degrees

• Ph.D. in Classics, Princeton University (2016)
• B.A. in Classics, Cambridge University (2008)

Recent Courses

2018 -2019: Assistant Professor, University of Texas at San Antonio

•  Intermediate Latin II Universoty of Texas at San Antonio
• Senior Seminar (Medical Humanities) University of Texas as San Antonio
• Intermediate Latin I University of Texas at San Antonio
• Classical Mythology University of Texas at San Antonio
•  Ancient Medicine University of Southern California

2017: Univeristy of Southern California

• Bodies in Antiquity

2016: University of Southern California

• Beginning Greek
• Intermediate Latin Prison Teaching Initiative (NJ-STEP)
• Evil Princeton University

2015

• Beginning Latin Prison Teaching Initiative (NJ-STEP)
• Beginning Latin Princeton University 
• Thinking about Knowing Prison Teaching Initiative (NJ-STEP)

Fall 2014

• The Aeneid and Its Influences Prison Teaching Initiative (NJ-STEP)
•  The Journey Theme Prison Teaching Initiative (NJ-STEP)
• Origins and Nature of English Vocabulary Princeton University

Recent Publications

In Preparation The Care of the Brain in Early Christianity.

2017 The Jesuits in Ethiopia (1609-1641): Latin Letters in Translation, translated by Jessica

Wright and Leon Grek, introduced by Leonardo Cohen, edited by Wendy Laura

Belcher. Äthiopistische Forschungen series. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.

PEER-REVIEW ARTICLES

Under Review “Preaching Phrenitis: The Medicalization of Religious Difference in Augustine of

Hippo,” Journal of Early Christian Studies.

Forthcoming “The Brain is a Treasury of Marrow: Theodoret’s Marginal Metaphor of the Brain,”

Studies in Late Antiquity 2.4 (expected November 2018).

2017 “John Chrysostom and the Rhetoric of Cerebral Vulnerability,” Studia Patristica 81.7, 109–126.

2015 “Between Despondency and the Demon: Diagnosing and Treating Spiritual Disorders in

John Chrysostom's Letter to Stageirios,” Journal of Late Antiquity 8.2, 352–367.

BOOK CHAPTERS

Forthcoming “Ventricular Localisation in Late Antiquity: The Philosophical and Theological Roots of an Enduring Medical Model,” in Imagining the Brain: Episodes in the Visual

History of Brain Research, edited by Chiara Ambrosio and William Maclehose.

London: Elsevier.

“Brain, Nerves, and Ecclesial Membership in John Chrysostom,” in (Re)Visioning John

Chrysostom: New Theories and Approaches, edited by Chris L. De Wet and Wendy Mayer. Leiden: Brill.

“Humanizing the Brain in Early Christianity,” in Embodied Difference: Divergent Bodies

in Public Discourse, edited by Jamie Thomas and Christina Jackson. Lanham,

MD: Lexington Books (expected September 2018)