U of U History Professor Awarded Prestigious NEH Grant

Isabel Moreira, Distinguished Professor of history, has been awarded a prestigious fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to research her next book – Owning Salvation: Property and Its Loss in Late Antiquity. Moreira’s proposal rose to the top of a fiercely competitive grant cycle; she is one of only 25 scholars nationwide recognized with a fellowship.

Moreira will be diving into an innovative project that combines material items from Gaul, 400 to 800 C.E., embedding them in a narrative that can be reconstructed from written texts of the same era. Says Moreira, “Much of archaeology tends to de-emphasize personal narrative. What I wanted to do is to connect some narratives to some material items. This lets us see how people were thinking about their property and possessions – the things they cared about, and things that they mourned when they were lost.”

The research builds on work that Moreira began laying out in the 2021 “Rings on Her Fingers: Merovingian Rings and Religion in Late Antiquity,” published in Material Culture and Women’s Religious Experience in Antiquity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium.

This latest addition to the project was inspired by ‘Thanksgiving,’ a poem written by Paulinus of Pella. Paulinus was born into wealth and luxury as a member of the Roman aristocracy but over eight decades of political turmoil lost almost everything. In an era when material possessions were believed to be an indicator of God’s favor, Paulinus wrote anxiously about his potential salvation in light of his diminished social and financial status.

Although some historians have found Paulinus to be a puzzling and unappealing character, the poem prompted Moreira to re-evaluate his experience in light of shifting cultural norms around religion, wealth, poverty, and salvation. She is also illuminating the broader context in which these norms were shifting. Newcomers to Gaul brought new burial practices, including mindful deposition of grave goods, and this became a Christian practice for some centuries.

At the heart of this project is a centuries-old contradiction between competing ideas about whether wealth or poverty was the way to eternal salvation. As Moreira points out, “Christians have always cared about the things they owned. The New Testament call for radical poverty never sat easily in Christian communities.” Her research will offer a counternarrative to some long-held assumptions about religious beliefs during late antiquity in Europe.

Congratulations to Dr. Moreira on this NEH fellowship. This prestigious award recognizes her groundbreaking work and highlights the vital role of the humanities in building a more informed, thoughtful, and engaged society.