This paper evaluates the recent upsurge of interest in the scribal processes underlying the composition of Hittite ritual text and the implications of this evidence for understanding the compositional history of biblical rituals.

Syllabus for my course Jewish and Christian Scriptures at Augustana College. Most students who take the course are non-majors, and they take it to fulfill their “Christian Traditions” requirement. I focus on reading primary sources (both biblical and extra-canonical), supplementing with Bible Odyssey materials and pre-recorded online lectures.

Review of Women in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe edited by Christine Meek (Four Courts Press, 2000)

Review of Medici Women: Portraits of Power, Love, and Betrayal by Gabrielle Langdon

Chapter in Witwenschaft in der frühen Neuzeit: fürstliche und adlige Witwen zwischen Fremd- und Selbstbestimmung

Chapter 8 in The Single Woman in Medieval and Early Modern England: Her Life and Representation

Ch 5 of Grief and Gender, 700-1700

Chapter 10 in Growing Old in Early Modern Europe: Cultural Representations

Chapter in Women and Portraits in Early Modern Europe: Gender, Agency and Identity

Afterword of Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe

Ch. 13 of Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe

Introduction to Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe

This article defends the disputed label “private creeds” as a useful one for describing a number of fourth century texts. Offering such a confession was the normal method for clearing one’s name on charges of heterodoxy in fourth-century Greek Christianity, though writing such a creed made the author susceptible to charges of innovation. A numbe…[Read more]

Argues that, reversing the trope of subjects visiting the magnificent, the Elohistic history has Yahweh interested in the simplest, flimsiest altars only, which he will visit when and where he is invited to do so. The implication rules out temple-altars and temples for their royal sponsorship.

Analyzes Isaiah 40–48 as a single literary work through levels of speakers (frame and subordinate) with implications for its construction of divine potency and communication.

This is the first English translation of Gregory of Nyssa’s Christmas homily, In diem natalem Salvatoris. It will be published in Mark DelCogliano, ed. The Cambridge Edition of Early Christian Writings, Volume 3: Christ.

This essay describes the popular Bechdel Test—a measure of women’s dialogue in films—in terms of social network analysis within fictional narrative. It argues that this form of vernacular criticism arrives at a productive convergence with contemporary academic critical methodologies in surface and postcritical reading practices, on the one hand,…[Read more]

A Ph.D. dissertation considering nearly 200 sarcophagi from the late ancient necropoleis of Jewish communities at Beth She’arim and Rome. This corpus captures a wide range of the possibilities open to Jewish patrons as they went about acquiring or commissioning a sarcophagus and sculptural program. The variety reflects not only the different…[Read more]

A paper delivered at in the 2017 Colloquia of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Considers how a group of sarcophagi from the Jewish catacombs of Rome reflect on the subject of Jewish art and Jewish patrons in Late Antiquity.