Research areas: religions in the Roman empire, materiality, images and visual culture
Biography:
Dane is a PhD candidate in Religious Studies at Boston University specializing in the religions of the Roman Empire. His research examines the lived and material dimensions of ancient religion, with particular attention to how objects, images, and spaces shaped encounters with supernatural beings. He is an affiliate of the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies and was a 2023–2024 fellow at the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs (CURA).
His dissertation, “Encountering the Gods: The ‘Dynamics of Iconicity’ and the Power of Divine Images in the Roman Empire,” supervised by David Frankfurter, examines how material objects like statues could come to be experienced and treated as manifestations of the gods. Through a series of case studies drawn across the Roman Empire, he develops a framework for understanding how ancient communities navigated the boundary between an image as an object and an image as divine presence, and how the images themselves seemed to disclose their own personhood to the people who approached them.
Dane has taught in a wide variety of classes, from Introduction to Religion, Death and Immortality, Religions of Asia, and Roman History. He has written for Religious Studies Review and Bible Odyssey, and has also published in Seshat: Global History Databank.
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