The Père Paul Symposium (2026)
An in-Person and Online Event
Sponsored by
The Hidden Pearl Institute,
The Hidden Pearl Press,
and The Institute for the Study of Eastern Christianity
✓ 4:15–6:30 p.m., Friday, September 18, 2026
✓ Caldwell Auditorioum
Caldwell Hall
The Catholic University of America
✓ The Père Paul Lecture (5:00–6:15 p.m.)
✓ Scholarship Award (6:15 pm–6:30 p.m.)
✓ Light Dinner (6:30 pm–7:30 p.m.)
✓ Live Streamed on Facebook
The Père Paul Lecture
Presented by
Janet A. Timbie
timbie@cua.edu
AB Stanford, PhD University of Pennsylvania
Adjunct Associate Professor of Semitics,
Department of Ancient and Medieval Languages and Cultures
The Catholic University of America
I teach in the Department of Ancient and Medieval Languages and Cultures at Catholic University, specializing in Coptic language and literature. I have taught beginning and advanced Coptic, as well as courses in the history of the Christian Near East at CUA since 2002. My research interests include monasticism in Egypt, the Bible in Coptic, and questions of multilingualism in Egypt in the Byzantine period.
Throughout Canon 8, with more or less emphasis, Shenoute of Atripe, fifth-century leader of the White Monastery Federation in Upper Egypt, refers to his own chronic illness and its symptoms. He seems to study these symptoms in order to better understand and correct the sinful behavior of members of his monastic community, as well as his own sins. Just as Evagrius defined and described eight “thoughts” and put them in a logical sequence to help the contemplative monk, Shenoute looks to the ailing body. Studies of ancient medicine (dealing with Herophilus, Galen, and others) and of the role of illness in early Christian thought (see Andrew Crislip, Thorns in the Flesh) provide context for Shenoute’s ideas, but also highlight his unusual perspective.
Janet A. Timbie
Guest Speaker
Ruth Kramer
rtk8@georgetown.edu
BA Brown University, University of California, Santa Cruz
Associate Professor,
Department of Linguistics,
Georgetown University
Ruth Kramer is an Associate Professor in the Linguistics Department at Georgetown University, with a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz in Linguistics and a B.A. from Brown University in Egyptology and Linguistics. Her research area is morphosyntax, with a special emphasis on grammatical gender and verbal agreement. She focuses mostly on Afroasiatic languages, especially Amharic (Ethiosemitic), Ancient Egyptian, and Cushitic languages (Afar, Oromo, Sidaama). She published a 2015 monograph with Oxford University Press entitled The Morphosyntax of Gender and she has published multiple papers in journals such as Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Linguistic Inquiry, Glossa, Brill’s Journal of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics, and Lingua Aegyptia, among others.
The nominal system of Coptic has traditionally been studied from the point of view of historical reconstruction. In this talk, we develop a synchronic analysis of nominal inflection under a root-and-pattern approach, with a special focus on plural nouns. Plural nouns in Coptic show an array of interesting morphological and syntactic patterns, including a null plural marker and multiple irregular plural strategies. They also interact with gender marking in complex ways. We advance a “split plural” analysis of Coptic plural nouns that accounts for these properties and explore the implications of the analysis for linguistic theory.
Ruth Kramer (Georgetown), Chris Reintges (CNRS)
