Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: Maia Kotrosits, "After Transformation: Rewriting Time, Christian Late Antiquity, and the Present" (Duke UP, 2025)
Release Date: November 24, 2025
Host: Mike Motilla
Guest: Maia Kotrosits

Episode Overview

This episode features a conversation between host Mike Motilla and scholar Maia Kotrosits about her forthcoming book After Transformation: Rewriting Time, Christian Late Antiquity, and the Present. The discussion delves into the concept of “lyrical history,” challenges to traditional historiography, resonances between past and present, and the ethical and emotional dimensions of historical writing. Kotrosits articulates a vision for engaging deeply with history, not simply as a collection of facts, but as an imaginative and affective practice that can reshape both the past and our understanding of ourselves now.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining Lyrical History

• What is Lyrical History?
  • Lyrical historiography is described as a poetic, expressive mode of historical writing that values musicality, imagination, emotion, and openness to subjectivity ([05:19]).
  • Kotrosits draws on a tradition of beautiful and affective writing in early Christian studies, extending it even further in her book.
  • Contrasts with the "dry, rationalist, mastery-driven" approaches commonly found in academic history.
• Key Quote:
  • “I use lyricism here, not just as a style of writing, but really as an epistemology, a way of knowing some things that we can't get at with the very kind of clumsy tools of stereotypical history.” – Kotrosits ([07:53])

2. Why Does Lyrical History Matter?

• Lyrical history enables a granular, intimate view of lived experience, capturing aspects of daily life, trauma, aspiration, and failure often lost in large-scale, dominant narratives ([09:22]).
• Brings out “the restlessness, the aspirations and failures… the damages incurred by colonialism, things like trauma, just human grasping for meaning or disappointment” ([09:39]).

3. Poetic Reading—Example from the Book

• Kotrosits reads three interconnected pieces from early in her book:
  • In Fragments with Julius Africanus (poetic meditation on assembling history) ([11:41])
  • Eusebius Tries to Organize Time, Part One (on imposing narrative and control over history)
  • An excerpt about the historian A.H.M. Jones (reflecting on mastery and sources).
• These passages illustrate her approach to blending poetry, prose, and historiographic reflection ([11:41–15:13]).

4. Juxtaposition & Broken Narratives

• Inspired by Dionne Brand’s notion that “it takes a broken story to reflect a broken world.”
• Kotrosits seeks to disrupt standard teleological or genealogical modes of history in favor of “scrambling time and cause and effect”—letting fragments and resonances illuminate one another ([15:57]).
• Influenced by David Maldonado Rivera’s work tying linear history to colonial narratives ([16:24]).

5. Lyrical History & Theory

• Lyrical history isn’t just a literary exercise—it’s theoretical. The period of Late Antiquity itself can yield theoretical insights; theory need not only flow one way from contemporary thinkers to the past ([20:26], [21:26]).
• Example: Exploring the theme of interiority as it emerges in late antiquity and how it relates to colonial and gendered bodies, tying together sources from Augustine to psychoanalysis to modern medicine ([21:26]).

6. What Does ‘After Transformation’ Mean?

• The concept of "transformation" in Late Antiquity, popularized by Peter Brown, initially aimed to recast the era as “alive” and not simply a decline.

• Kotrosits critiques how “transformation” has come to mask messier, partial, disappointing, or incomplete change and often aligns with Christian exceptionalism ([26:02]).

• "After transformation" signifies attending to the incomplete, disappointing, or ambiguous aspects of change, rather than assuming transformation is always total, progressive, or redemptive ([26:02]).

• On the Seven Sleepers:

  • Contrast with Peter Brown: Brown frames the story optimistically, Kotrosits reads it as “spooky and haunting,” highlighting the fantasy of being untouched by political change and the ambiguities of transformation ([28:49]).
  • Warns against rehashing narratives of “decline and fall”—not seeking to forge a direct equivalency between late antiquity and the present moment ([29:04–32:10]).

7. Writing as an Act of Love

• Motilla notes that Kotrosits’s method, even when documenting pain and violence, is animated by a love for the world, informed by psychoanalytic traditions ([35:03]).
• Kotrosits responds that her work is not about “being angry at the violence of worlds,” but metabolizing that anger into “something with a more subtle force to it, something that breeds more than anger… to make bad worlds livable, to refuse deadness and find capacities in bad worlds that bad worlds would otherwise shut out” ([35:03]).

8. Co-Authoring & Invented Sources

• The book features fictional (invented) sources, such as epigraphs and postcards from the pilgrim Egeria—part of a process Kotrosits calls “co-authoring” ([37:39]).
• This is both a nod to the inherent co-voicing and creative work present in all historical writing, and a playful, honest exposure of scholarship’s constructed nature ([38:15]).
• “The solidity of everything we use as evidence is produced… here too, I don’t think what I’m doing is really any different than a lot of other scholarly processes, just being very overt with the production and playful.” ([40:39])

9. Rethinking Academic Life

• In a precarious academic climate, Kotrosits reflects on intellectual work as having horizons beyond institutions and career incentives ([44:58]).
• Importance of intellectual risk, community, and bringing “new life to the material” as ends in themselves ([45:03]).
• Academic work “should never be institutions and disciplines… The first step is to want something more than a certain job… and to ask what is the work for?” ([45:03])

10. Hopes for Readers

• Kotrosits hopes readers will break from institutional, disciplinary boundaries and “be willing to break some things in the name of more life, whatever that might mean to you” ([49:25]).
• She wishes for her book not to be reducible to an argument or call for imitation, but to offer “an attunement… to experience history differently” ([50:15]).

Notable Quotes & Moments

• “Lyrical history is speculative world making, among other things.” – Kotrosits ([24:20])
• “Transformation as an epistemology of change too… has this kind of romance to it. Change, I think, it's just much more confusing, much more uncertain… So the after in after transformation is this effort to pay attention to the partiality of change, the disappointments of change, and also to pay attention to the space between what Christian practices promised and what they delivered…” – Kotrosits ([26:34])
• “Catastrophe is not the end of Empire. Catastrophe is simply Empire in its dailiness. And we actually don't know what time we're in.” – Kotrosits ([31:45])
• “I instinctively choose beauty. Not to make bad worlds seem better… but I choose beauty to make bad worlds livable, to refuse deadness and find capacities in bad worlds that bad worlds would otherwise shut out.” – Kotrosits ([36:36])
• “All historical work is co-voicing… We speak through ancient figures and texts, they speak through us. But as scholars we’re trained to reflexively refuse this, to disaggregate subjects, to separate out strands… I’m just simply being a little bit more overt and playful with that fact.” – Kotrosits ([38:15])
• “Academia is a risk-averse profession… but you need to take risks to keep intellectual work alive and otherwise, you’re dead in the water.” – Kotrosits ([45:00])

Timestamps for Key Segments

• [05:19] – Defining "lyrical history" and its traditions
• [09:22] – What granular, affective history can reveal
• [11:41] – Kotrosits reads from her book: three poetic-prose selections
• [15:57] – On “broken stories” and juxtaposition, Brand & Rivera influences
• [21:26] – Example: theorizing “interiority” in Late Antiquity
• [26:02] – Rethinking “transformation” in historical periods
• [28:49] – Story of the Seven Sleepers: Brown’s vs. Kotrosits’s reading
• [35:03] – Writing out of love, not just anger or complaint
• [37:39] – Invented sources, postcards, and the concept of “co-authoring”
• [44:58] – Rethinking academic life and the purpose of intellectual work
• [49:25] – Hopes for readers and what the book offers

Tone & Language

Kotrosits writes and speaks with a blend of poetic lyricism, critical theory, and reflective self-awareness. The tone is deeply thoughtful, at times playful, and always attentive to the emotional, ethical, and aesthetic stakes of writing and doing history.

Closing

Kotrosits concludes by expressing that she doesn’t always know what her next project will become, but is interested in further exploring “co-voicing, co-authoring, and blur in history,” particularly through prosopopoeia—assuming the voices of others ([50:43]). She expresses gratitude and notes her hope that her work opens up new attunements to history.

For listeners, this episode is not only a window into the spirit and substance of Kotrosits’s new book, but also an invitation to reimagine the practice of history, to break and remake the forms we use to understand the past and ourselves.