On April 10, the Classical and Early Mediterranean Studies department hosted a mini-conference titled “Monks as Craftsmen in Byzantine Egypt: Exploring Monastic Life with Augmented Reality,” with additional support from the Mandel Center for the Humanities, the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies department and Brandeis Design and Innovation. The conference hosted four speakers from universities and museums.

     The first speaker, Dr. Elizabeth Dospěl Williams, came from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts as the Penny Vinik Chair of Fashion, Textiles and Jewelry. Williams presented on several curatorial projects she has worked on relating to the textiles of Egyptian monks. The second presenter, Dr. Agnieszka E. Szymanska, came from the Art and Art History department of the University of Richmond. She brought with her a 3D scan of the Red Monastery located in Sohag, Egypt, which conference attendees were able to view using virtual reality technology after the conclusion of the panel. The third speaker, Dr. Kim Haines-Eitzen from Cornell University’s Near Eastern Studies Program, presented her research on the soundscapes of ancient monastic life. During her presentation, she played the audience an audio recording that she collected from a desert in Egypt and juxtaposed the implications of natural and manmade sounds.

     The final presenter, Dr. Darlene Brooks-Hedstrom (CEMS, NEJS), presented her use of augmented reality to experiment with the materiality of ancient monastic life. As a beta tester of Case Western University’s CrewXR program — originally meant as a biomedical teaching tool — Brooks-Hedstrom helped repurpose this technology to be used in humanities research and has taught two classes, in both the spring 2025 and 2026 semesters, which utilize the program. In these classes, students created immersive digital displays populated with a combination of 2D and 3D assets, both their own and those existing in museums and collections. These displays are meant to allow viewers to envision what monastic living spaces and the lives of monks would have been like.

       Building on her spring 2025 semester class, the course associated with this ongoing experiment this semester is “Holy Christian Threads! The History and Craft of Making Early Christian Clothing.” In this six-credit course, students learned how to process wool, spin it and weave textiles from that, in a similar fashion to how monks did. In addition, students conducted research on undisplayed textiles at the MFA, facilitated by Dr. Williams. Through a combination of processing wool, weaving and research at the MFA, students 3D scanned the textiles and drop spindles they created to be displayed in CrewXR. Following the conclusion of the panel, attendees were invited to experience the monastic cell populated by Brandeis students and interact with the digital assets in these AR rooms.

— Editor’s note: acute accent over n cannot be added in Szymanska.