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 – 600 CE. I work especially with New Testament and early Christian literature, late ancient and Byzantine apocryphal literature, and modern (ab)uses of ancient Mediterranean literature and history. My research largely utilizes Greek, Latin, and Coptic—although I continually am incorporating Syriac, Ge’ez (Ethiopic), Hebrew, and Aramaic.

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

  • Roman slavery and colonial expansionism
  • Gender, sexuality, and sexual violence
  • Authorship and authorial attribution
  • Christian anti-Judaism
  • Christian apocryphal literature
  • Hellenistic, Roman, and early Byzantine Palestine

Projects in Progress

Does Jesus treat us as good-for-nothing slaves in Luke 17? | Psephizo

“Recalibrating Slavery Studies within Jesus Scholarship.” Forthcoming in Rewriting Jesus (ed. Brandon Massey and Wolfgang Grünstäudl)

The brutal realities and ideologies of slavery in the Roman Mediterranean—and in Roman Palestine in particular—are a part of Jesus studies that often goes unnoticed or unspoken. It has historically made professional and lay New Testament readers uncomfortable to wrestle with a Jesus who was fully ingrained in a slaveholding society. In this article, I offer some thoughts and possible directions on how Jesus scholarship could better incorporate the historical and theoretical offerings of slavery studies into future analyses. In three sections, I: (1) provide a brief overview of four theoretical shifts in slavery studies that I think are beneficial for the study of Christian origins; (2) turn to parable studies to point out the parabolic normalization of violence against enslaved persons, and; (3) treat the Gospel of Mark as a case study in how scholars might reread gospel literature in ways that foreground the presence of enslaved persons and their enslavers. Although often rendered invisible by both ancient authors and modern readers, enslaved persons were part of Jesus’s world. Recognizing their role in the social, economic, and religious practices of Roman Palestine will ideally continue to help us rethink older models of Jesus the “Great Man.”

“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.