Research Areas & Trajectories | Projects in Progress

Research Areas & Trajectories

My research and teaching interests span across over two millennia, although focus mostly on literature written between 200 BCE – 400 CE. I work especially with New Testament and early Christian literature, Greek and Latin literature of the Hellenistic and Roman eras, late ancient and Byzantine apocryphal literature, and the modern reception of ancient Mediterranean literature. My research largely utilizes Greek, Latin, and Coptic—although I continually am incorporating Syriac, Ge’ez (Ethiopic), and Hebrew.

I have five general trajectories for my research, although often extend past them.

• Roman slavery and colonial expansionism
• Gender, sexuality, and sexual violence
• Authorship and attribution
• Christian anti-Judaism
• Apocryphal Christian literature

Projects in Progress

“Religion and Slave Revolts in the Graeco-Roman World.”

In this project, I explore how religious expressions and practices were key features in the catalyzing and suppression of ancient slave revolts. In particular, I analyze how forced migration, racial and kinship ties, avenues of communication with deities, accusations of ecstasy, and memory-making impacted both the historical events and the literary narration of these revolts. As a scholar primarily trained in religious studies, I bring together historical and literary data, recent theorization of “religion” and its effects, and robust methodological considerations from slavery studies to highlight the impact of the religious cultures of enslaved persons and its literary afterlives within and upon ancient Mediterranean slave revolts. This project takes up the call to more deeply examine the religious lives of ancient enslaved persons, advocates for the role of religious studies in historical analyses of slave revolts, and grapples with perennial questions regarding the limits and opportunities offered through ancient archives of slavery.

“Monogamous Monotheism and Polyamorous Terror in Tertullian of Carthage’s On Monogamy.” Forthcoming in QTR: A Journal of Queer and Transgender Studies in Religion 2.1 (April 2025).

While polyamory and non-monogamy as practiced today are often understood to be modern phenomena, queer theorization about monogamy and polygamy may offer new insights into the history of Christianity. In this article, I analyze Tertullian’s 3^rd-century treatise On Monogamy in light of recent scholarship on mononormativity and the “poly gaze” to expose how ancient and modern constructions of kinship and relationship rely on and reify similar monogamous standards. After discussing and critiquing Tertullian’s legal, social, biblical, and cosmological defense of monogamy, I end by arguing that poly resonances in biblical and early Christian literature might be more deeply examined by future scholarship.

“Mines and Prisons as Sites of Insecurity and Confinement in Eusebius’s On the Martyrs of Palestine.” Forthcoming in Pain, Trauma, and Suffering in the Roman Empire: Experiencing Insecurity (ed. Zsuzsanna Varhelyi and James Uden)

Composed in the 310s, Eusebius of Caesarea’s On the Martyrs of Palestine narrates the martyrdoms of numerous Palestinian Christians during the reign of Diocletian. My aim in this chapter is to explore how mines and prisons—as discussed in both classical scholarship and through theoretical interventions in carceral and slavery studies—functioned in ancient literary accounts as trauma-inducing sites of insecurity and containment, meant to control the movements and sensory experiences of individuals. Through recalling this type of embodied control that could induce both physical and psychological trauma, Eusebius’s narration of Diocletian’s persecution highlights how individuals marginalized by the sovereign state may be subject not only to bodily discipline, but also to economic exploitation and the embodied consequences of being crafted as a death-bound subject.

“The Death-Bound-Subject: Slavery, Aging, and Old Age in Roman Egypt.” In So Wicked and So Wild: Aging, Old Age, and Bodily Representation in the Ancient World (ed. Alison Acker Gruseke and Carol Meyers)

How do old age and aging affect the historical lives and literary representations of enslaved persons in the ancient Mediterranean world? Conversely, how do the logic and mechanics of slavery impact the process of aging or ideas about age? To provide some answers to these questions, this chapter sifts ancient literary, historical, and papyrological material for insights about the realities of and discourses surrounding enslaved persons, old age, and the aging process. To start, I provide some theoretical and methodological context for studying age and aging broadly within slavery studies, especially in conversation with scholars of modern slavery in the Atlantic World and Black Studies. Then, I turn to classical scholarship on representations of slavery and the demography of the Roman Empire—Roman Egypt in particular—to consider existing information about the chronological ages of enslaved persons and their social and legal treatment within the Roman slavocracy. Third, to highlight the humanity of enslaved older persons, I provide brief accounts of the lives of three enslaved persons whose lives are attested in Roman Egyptian records. The stories build on the work of Saidiya Hartman, a scholar of Atlantic slavery, who proposed “critical fabulation” as an approach to telling the stories of barely documented enslaved persons’ lives in order to make sense of the lives of those whom imperial archives did not preserve.