Michael Champion

Australian Catholic University, Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry, Faculty Member

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I am Professor of Late Antique and Early Christian Studies at ACU and Associate Dean, Faculty of Theology and Philosophy (Research). I have been Acting Director and Deputy Director, Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry, and Director, ACU Node, Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.

My research investigates interactions between ancient philosophy and early Christian thought, late-antique education and monasticism, ancient ethics, the history of violence, and the history of emotions.

After studying Mathematical Physics, Classics, Late-Antique Studies and Theology in Melbourne and London, I taught Classics and Medieval Studies at the University of Western Australia (2009–2015). I joined ACU’s Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry in 2015. In 2016 I was an Associate Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.

I am a chief investigator on the Australian Research Council Discovery Project: The Ancient Today: Living Traditions of Classical Language Education. I am also a chief investigator on a project investigating Flourishing in Early Christianity.

I am co-editor (with Matthew Crawford and Lewis Ayres) of a 900+ pp volume with Cambridge University Press resulting from the ACU-funded international collaboration 'Modes of Knowing and the Ordering of Knowledge in Early Christianity'.

In emotions history, I have co-edited collections on approaches to understanding emotions and on the long history of the keywords affectus and affectio and their vernacular cognates. I have a current project on the work emotions do in education in different cultures.

In history of education and history of philosophy, I study changes to Classical Greek and Roman educational ideology and practice from late antiquity to Byzantium, most recently in Dorotheus of Gaza and Ascetic Education (Oxford).

In history of violence, I have co-edited a collection on cultural perceptions of violence in the Hellenistic period, and have ongoing projects on the ethics of war.

These projects intersect with a large-scale and long-term project on conceptualisations and institutions of justice and equity from classical antiquity to Byzantium.
Address: 250 Victoria Pde
East Melbourne, VIC., 3002

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Books by Michael Champion

Dorotheus of Gaza and Ascetic Education

Dorotheus of Gaza and Ascetic Education, 2022

Dorotheus of Gaza and Ascetic Education approaches fundamental questions about the role and funct... more Dorotheus of Gaza and Ascetic Education approaches fundamental questions about the role and function of education in late antiquity through a detailed study of the thought of Dorotheus of Gaza, a sixth-century Palestinian monk. It illumines the thought of a significant figure in Palestinian monasticism, clarifies relationships between ascetic and classical education, and contributes to debates about how different educational projects related to late-antique cultural change. Dorotheus appropriates and reconfigures classical discourses of rhetoric, philosophy, and medicine and builds on earlier ascetic traditions. Education is a powerful site for the reconfiguration and reproduction of culture, and Dorotheus' educational programme can be read as a microcosm of the wider culture he aims to construct partly through his adaptation and representation of classical and ascetic discourses. Key features of his educational programme include the role of the notion of godlikeness, the governing role of humility as an epistemic virtue intended to organize affective and ethical development, and his notion of education as life-long habituation. For Dorotheus, education is irreducibly affective and transformative rather than merely informative at the individual and communal scales. His epistemology and ethics are set within an account of the divine plan of salvation which is intended to provide a narrative framework through which his students come to understand the world and their place in it. His account of ways of knowing and ordering knowledge, ethics and moral development, emotions of education, and relationships between affect, cognition, and ethical action aims towards transformation of his students and their communities.

Explaining the Cosmos: Creation and Cultural Interaction in Late-Antique Gaza (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014)

The Intellectual World of Late Antique Christianity: Reshaping Classical Traditions, edited with Lewis Ayres and Matthew Crawford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023

The Intellectual World of Late-Antique Christianity explores new perspectives on early Christian ... more The Intellectual World of Late-Antique Christianity explores new perspectives on early Christian epistemology in relation to the changing discourses, institutions, and material culture of late antiquity. Early Christian modes of knowing and ordering knowledge involved complex processes of appropriation, reproduction, and reconfiguration of Jewish and classical epistemologies. This helped Christians develop cultures of interpretation and argument as textually oriented religious communities within the Roman Empire and beyond. It laid an intellectual foundation that would be built upon and modified in a variety of later contexts. Encompassing Greek, Latin, and Syriac Christianity, and an historical arc that stretches from the New Testament to Bede, this volume traces how diverse theological commitments resulted in distinctive Christian accounts of knowing. It foregrounds the myriad ways in which early Christian epistemology was embedded in earlier intellectual traditions and forms of life, and how they established norms for communal life and powerful ways of acting in the world.