“In town, there’s the square of the martyrs, and there’s graffiti, but the fighting was between people and police. Except for the square, you’d never know something had happened.” As might be imagined, the group stood out a
bit. “Apparently we were the first major student group to go into the town,” says Schraeder. “But we were warmly welcomed by everyone we met, each of whom wanted to tell their story and to ask that we go back and tell the world that Tuni- sia has changed for the better.” As Bouazizi’s protest became a catalyst for the
rest of Tunisia, so Tunisia’s revolution became a catalyst for the subsequent uprisings of the Arab Spring, including in Tunisia’s neighbor to the east, Libya. “We were driving through southern Tunisia when we passed a stadium, and a profes- sor at a university in Tunis had told us that there was a camp in a sports complex that had been housing Libyan refugees,“ says Murphy. Schraed- er decided to see if the Qatari military, which was operating the camp, would grant them entrance. “There was a little bit of hesitation, because none of the students had ever been to a refugee camp be- fore,” recalls Schraeder, who had previously visited refugee camps in Djibouti and Soma-
Peter Schraeder
lia. But enthusiasm soon grew among students to see what they could contribute. “They bought soccer balls and took up a collection among themselves to buy water. One student bought a big jar of suckers,” says Schraeder. Upon entrance, the Loyola group remarked
upon the orderliness of the camp. “Children started coming out first, being curious and look- ing at people. Then some of the women popped their heads out of their tents.” Soon the Loyolans and the children of the camp were playing soccer, and communicating with each other as the language barrier allowed. “A girl of about 16 approached me with her sisters,” says Murphy. “She could speak a little English and was excited to practice, despite some initial shyness.” Murphy hopes to continue her studies with a
focus on Tunisia. “It definitely affected my larger plans,” she says. “We visited the U.S. embassy and a nonprofit for education and cultural exchange between the U.S. and the Middle East.“ Murphy and the 23 other students who partic-
ipated in Professor Schraeder’s travel course now have an even more vested interest in finding out, along with the rest of the world, how the effects of the Jasmine Revolution and the unfolding Arab Spring play out on the global stage.
A recent conference on a collection of ancient Roman texts discussed emperors, senators, bishops, heresies and schisms, Roman law and canon law, the codification of law, society, and language.
ROME
New light on ancient texts
about the past through fresh lenses of analysis. Alexander Evers, a faculty member at the John Felice Rome Cen- ter, recently organized a conference to shine new light on a collection of ancient Roman texts, the Collectio Avellana. On April 1-2, renowned scholars—
I
among them Loyola’s Jacqueline Long, associate professor of classical studies—gathered at the Royal Neth- erlands Institute in Rome to discuss the collection. The conference, called “Emperors, Bishops, and Senators: the Significance of the Collectio Avellana,” took an interdisciplinary approach to reach new understand- ing of the history and structures of the Roman Empire and early Church. The Avellana comprises 244 imperial and papal documents that were first
n Rome, the ancient and the modern coexist as in few other places. New insights are derived
published in a modern edition in 1895 and 1898 from only a few surviv- ing manuscripts. The earliest piece is a rescript of Emperor Valentinian I dealing with a series of events in 367 CE; the latest is a letter from Pope Vigilius to Emperor Justinian, written on May 14, 553 CE. According to Evers, assistant professor of classics and Ro- man history at the JFRC, the majority of the documents are preserved only in this collection. “This was the first time ever that
this most remarkable collection of texts was studied in a systematic way, with some fascinating results,” says Evers. One suggestion that emerged from the conference is that the Col- lectio might have been compiled by someone close to the bishop of Rome in the 6th century in an attempt to establish or strenghten the secular power of the bishop. Future sessions are to follow in
Oxford in 2013 and in Chicago in 2015. Evers will work on an English translation of all the documents, to be published together with a historical commentary, to make this important collection accessible to a wider public.
To learn more, contact Professor Evers at
aevers@luc.edu.
SUMMER 2011
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