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Almost thirty years ago, in the fall of 1996, I arrived in Hyde Park. I was a Classics student from Spain, eager to start my doctoral studies at the University of Chicago. I was admitted to the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World, which, for decades, ran a successful interdisciplinary program for students who, like me, wanted to pursue coursework and research beyond the traditional confines of the classical languages and literatures. 

I was driven to explore the connections between Greek and Levantine cultures. The sheer idea that the classical canon, that pillar of European scholastic tradition, carried Semitic, Near Eastern “cultural DNA,” was a revelation to me, and a provocation to the Eurocentric core of the field. I came to Chicago to discover how to explore this subfield. If not here, where? 

Though most of my coursework took place in the Classics building, the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (then called the Oriental Institute), and the Regenstein Library, Swift Hall and its memorable Divinity School classes turned out to be where I found my path as a scholar. 

This path, as the reader may have guessed, led me to the study of ancient religion.  

To my many years of Latin and Greek, I added training in Biblical Hebrew, Phoenician-Punic, and Ugaritic at ISAC, taking advantage of UChicago’s well-reputed offerings to solidify my knowledge of research languages important to my work. Among those foundational language classes and my other coursework, a sequence of classes on ancient Mediterranean religions stands out as definitive for my career.

The first course was dedicated to Israelite religion and taught by Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Professor of Hebrew Bible and the History of Judaism, author of In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth (Random House, 1993). The second was a class on Greek religion co-taught by Christopher Faraone, Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Classics, James Redfield, Edward Olson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the classics Department and the Committee on Social Thought, and Bruce Lincoln, Caroline E. Haskell Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Religions—experts, respectively, on Greek magic and religion, Greek literature and social history, and on the history of religions within a comparative, Indo-European framework. 

The third and final course in the sequence focused on Hellenistic religions and was taught by none other than the late Professor Jonathan Z. Smith (who rarely taught graduate students), another historian of religions and comparativist who needs little introduction here. The second chapter of Smith’s brilliant book Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (University of Chicago Press, 1982) is titled: “In Comparison a Magic Dwells.” The phrase perfectly encapsulates the possibilities those courses opened up for me, and the “magic” endures, enticing students to the corridors of Swift Hall with offers to study Japanese Buddhism alongside Islamic ethics and Reformation theology. 

That same year, I attended my first public lecture in the Third Floor Lecture Hall. Beneath the wooden reading angels, I listened to German scholar Walter Burkert speak about a topic involving Greek and Near Eastern religions, and after reading his little book, The Orientalizing Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1992), purchased at the Seminary Co-op the same day, it all clicked. Religion and narratives about the gods have since provided the most fruitful locus for my study of cultural exchange in the ancient Mediterranean. 

It was in Swift Hall that, during the age of the grand theories of religion, Mircea Eliade formulated his ideas about the universal experience of the sacred and the mediation of myth and ritual; here, where historians of religions such as Lincoln and Wendy Doniger continued to mobilize mythological narratives to reveal socio-cultural and political structures and psychological currents. My humble contribution to this tradition has been to lean on historically and archaeologically documented relations in the first millennium BCE to salvage the wreck of Helleno-Semitic cultural interactions in antiquity, with a heavy focus on creation and foundation narratives at the interface with the Phoenician and Punic worlds.

Swift Hall and the Divinity School have become my academic home, closing the circle from where it all began in 1996. I am privileged to teach in its classrooms, spend hours in its Common Room, and inhabit an office with neo-Gothic windows and wooden shelves that a previous owner (who knows how far back) labeled with masking tape, writing in careful calligraphy categories including “practical theology,” “modernism,” and “God.” 

My experience as a faculty member in this building has been far more immersive and multifaceted than I could have imagined as a student. I have found not only the expected old-school charm and rigor, but also a nourishing working and learning environment for students, staff, and faculty alike. To focus on the intellectual aspect, events at Swift Hall both foster and model interdisciplinary exchange and collaboration. For example, in the Dean’s Forum series, faculty discuss their recent books with a colleague either from an adjacent area or a more distant field, offering a considered response to the new work. Likewise, at annual faculty retreats, we don’t spend hours listening to administrative updates, discussing policy changes, or musing about who we are and where we are going as an institution. No. We spend hours discussing our colleagues’ works-in-progress. We reassert who we are and should be by giving each other’s scholarship serious thought, respect, and attention. The same deep intellectual engagement characterizes all other academic interactions and deliberations in the Divinity School, to a degree I have not experienced elsewhere in my career. 

The Divinity School was not my home department as a student, but Swift Hall was the physical and intellectual space where my interests and areas of study coalesced. I could not be happier to continue my journey as a scholar alongside the wonderful community within its gray stone walls.

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   J. Z. Smith was famously devoted to College students and engaging their fresh and open intellects. He would have probably been thrilled to see Swift Hall open its gates to undergraduate students in our growing Religion Core classes.