C. Michael Chin studies religion in the ancient Mediterranean world, specializing in the emergence of Christianity within Mediterranean polytheism. His work examines how people who lived in the Roman world thought about their gods, old and new, and how this thinking shaped the way they lived their everyday lives. He is particularly interested in the ways that seemingly mundane, trivial, strange, or esoteric details of everyday life and everyday thought in the ancient world can reveal the much larger imaginative structures on which ancient religious practice depended. His book Life: The Natural History of an Early Christian Universe (University of California Press, 2024) is an experiment in imagining one early Christian world from inside its idiosyncratic mixture of ancient scientific, magical, philosophical, and theological views. He teaches courses in early Christian ritual and practice, early Christian written culture, and the relationship between myth, ritual, and embodied experience in the ancient world more broadly.
In addition to his more traditional academic work, Chin works in puppetry and theater and is excited about ways in which academic research and experimental theater can come together. He is currently finishing a short co-written book on a multimedia adaptation of Euripides’ Bacchae for which he provided puppetry and video.