A conversation about two of Professor Krueger's published essays. “Homoerotic Spectacle and the Monastic Body in Symeon the New Theologian” (in Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline, edited by Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller [New York: Fordham University Press, 2006], 99-118, 399-403) and “Between Monks: Tales of Monastic Companionship in Early Byzantium,”(Journal of the History of Sexuality 20 [2011]: 28-61).
Derek Krueger is the Joe Rosenthal Excellence Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He received his AB from Amherst College in 1985 and his PhD from Princeton University in 1991. He has written on a variety of subjects in late antique and Byzantine cultural and religious history, including hagiography, monasticism, the everyday religion of lay Christians, and the reception of the Bible. His research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies in Washington, D.C. He is the author of two books on early Byzantine Christianity: Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius's Life and the Late Antique City (University of California Press, 1996); and Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); and is the editor of Byzantine Christianity, in the series A People's History of Christianity (Fortress Press, 2006). He is currently working on two books: one explores how the culture of monasticism in Byzantium produced ideas about masculinity, gender, sexuality, and friendship and another considers the formation of ideas about the Christian self in Byzantine liturgical celebration. He served on the advisory committee for an exhibition of medieval relics and reliquaries at the Cleveland, Walters and British Museums, for which he wrote the essay entitled “The Religion of Relics in Late Antiquity and Byzantium.” He currently serves as President of the Byzantine Studies Association of North America.