PROFILE

Jonathan L. Zecher, Ph.D., is a research fellow at Australian Catholic University. He completed his Ph.D. at Durham University in Patristics and Historical Theology in 2012. From 2011 until 2017, he taught full-time in the Honors College at the University of Houston—Greek, Latin, Christianity, “Great Books,” and ancient medicine.

As a research fellow at ACU, he studies early Christian asceticism, the medical cultures of late antiquity, and traditions of prayer and spiritual practice in Byzantium and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. His first book (2015) dealt with monastic engagements with death and judgment, focusing especially on the masterpiece of Byzantine monastic literature, the Ladder of Divine Ascent. His current monograph explores the medical context and logic of early monastic practices of spiritual direction.

His interest in medicine extends to clinical practices in late antiquity and their applicability to questions of clinical relationship and care being explored in the health/medical humanities today. He is pursuing this interest through research in the discursive histories of pain and emotion from Hellenistic philosophy through Byzantium. In context of this work, he serves on the board of ReMeDHe, an international working group for scholars interested in “Religion, Medicine, Disability, and Health in Late Antiquity.”