Professor Kristina Sessa Honored with Graves Award

Assistant Professor of History Kristina Sessa has been awarded the 2006 Graves Award for her new project Fighting for Christ and Rome: Christianity and the Culture of War in Late Antiquity (300-600 CE), a study she says will track the cultural history of war and its widespread human devastation, with particular attention to its impact on people's religious practices and ideals.
The award allows for Sessa, who currently is on leave, to undertake research to develop two new courses related to her project, which she would teach upon returning to CMC in fall 2007, she says.
This is the third Graves Award for CMC since 1991, when Robert Faggen, the Barton Evans and H. Andrea Neves Professor of Literature, received the honor. In 1999, the award was given to Lisa Cody, associate professor of history and department chair. Faculty members Nick Warner, professor of literature, and John Roth, the Edward J. Sexton Professor of Philosophy and director of the Center for the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights, also have been recipients of the Graves AwardWarner in 1986, and Roth in 1970.
The biannual Arnold S. Graves and Lois S. Graves Awards, administered at Pomona College under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies, honors "outstanding accomplishment in actual teaching in the humanities by younger faculty members" from private liberal arts colleges in California, Oregon, and Washington.
"This is a great honor for the history department and for the College," says Cody. "CMC has had only three winners since 1991. Tina Sessa's work is outstanding, and her new project in the works will be groundbreaking."
Sessa graduated with honors from Princeton University before earning a master's degree and doctorate in ancient and medieval history at the University of California at Berkeley. In addition to receiving the Graves Award, she has been the recipient of a Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, where she recently served as a visiting scholarfunded by a summer research grant from the Gould Center for the Humanities. She also was a visiting scholar at the Centre for Late Antiquity at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom.
Her areas of specialization are social and religious history of late antiquity, early medieval Italy, and Latin and Greek classic literature.