Giving Things a History: Maia Kotrosits

Our guest Dr. Maia Kotrosits offers a fresh perspective on objects, looking beyond physical material to consider how collective imagination shapes the formation of objects and the experience of reality.

Her recent book, The Lives of Objects, brings a psychoanalytic approach to the analysis of material culture, she examines objects of attachment—relationships, ideas, and beliefs that live on in the psyche—and illustrates how people across time have anchored value systems to the materiality of life.

Engaging with classical studies, history, anthropology, and literary, gender, and queer studies, Kotrosits shows how these disciplines address historical knowledge and how an expanded definition of materiality can help us make connections between antiquity and the contemporary world.

Maia Kotrosits is a scholar of ancient Mediterranean history and contemporary cultural studies. She specializes in ancient Christianity and Judaism, diaspora, postcolonial, psychoanalytic, gender, and queer theories. She is the author of Rethinking Early Christian Identity: Affect, Violence, and Belonging.