About

As a scholar and educator, I specialize in asking tough questions of identity, difference, representation, and pasts shared between Jews, Christians, and Samaritans. My research and teaching uses late ancient self-fashioning as a laboratory space for the critical approaches of the scholar of religion, as well as exploring the resonance of ancient identity in scholarship and intellectual history between the past and the present.

I teach courses in Jewish Studies, Mediterranean History, Biblical Studies, the History of Christianity, and Method and Theory in the Study of Religion. At present, I teach courses on Roman History and Race and Ethnicity in Antiquity.

Education

University of Pennsylvania: PhD in Religious Studies (Religions of Mediterranean Antiquity)

University of Oxford: MPhil Theology (Patristics), BA Philosophy and Theology

Other Publications

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Co-authored with Dr. Kameliya Atanasova, “The Status of Samaritans in Early Ottoman Palestine” [accepted for publication]

“The Rise and Fall of Peripheral Peoples? Samaritans and Late Antique Discourses of Disaster,” Studies in Late Antiquity 6:2 (2022): 217-47 [Contact me for PDF]

“Past Paul’s Jewishness: The Benjamite Paul in Epiphanius of Cyprus,” Harvard Theological Review 115:3 (2022): 309-30 [Contact me for PDF]

“Jewish Knowledge, Christian Scholars, and the European ‘Discovery’ of Samaritans” in The Samaritans: Tales of a Biblical People, ed. Steven Fine (Brill, 2022)

“Samaritans, Biblical Studies, and Ancient Judaism”, Currents in Biblical Research 20 (2021): 28-64 [Contact me for PDF]

“Rethinking Luke 10: The Parable of the Good Samaritan Israelite”, Journal of Biblical Literature 139 (2020): 543-66. [Contact me for PDF]

“Viewing Samaritans Jewishly: Josephus, the Samaritans, and the Identification of Israel”. Journal for the Study of Judaism 51 (2020): 339-66. [Contact me for PDF]

“Seeking as Suckling: The Milk of the Father in Clement of Alexandria’s Paedagogus I,6.” Studia Patristica 72 (2014): 59-73.

 

Other Publications

‘The Samaritan Other: Representation, History, and Lost Late Ancient Difference,’ Ancient Jew Review 

‘”Anti-Semitism” before “Semites”: The Risks and Rewards of Anachronism,’ The Public Medievalist

‘Thinking with Samaritans and Cynthia Baker’s Jew,’ Marginalia: A Los Angeles Review of Books Channel

‘How the Nineteenth Century Misplaced the Samaritans,’ Blog for the Journal of the History of Ideas

Rabbinic Literature entries “Malachi” and “Melchizedek” in Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception [forthcoming]

Reviews

Elizabeth Clark, The Fathers Refounded: Protestant Liberalism, Roman Catholic Modernism, and the Teaching of Ancient Christianity in Early Twentieth-Century America (UPenn, 2019), Reading Religion

Michael Stewart Williams, The Politics of Heresy in Ambrose of Milan (Cambridge, 2017), Ancient Jew Review

Moshe Blidstein, Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature (Oxford, 2018), Reading Religion

Éric Rebillard, Greek and Latin Narratives about the Ancient Martyrs (Oxford, 2017), Ancient Jew Review

Reinhard Pummer, The Samaritans: A Profile (W.B. Eerdmans, 2016), Reading Religion

Blog Posts

    Projects

    Book in-progress: The Samaritan Other: A New History of Identity in Late Antiquity

    Peer-review editor at Ancient Jew Review

    English-language editor for Tal’s edition of Samaritan midrash collection Tibat Marqe [here]

    NEH-funded Indic manuscript digitization project, Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies [Completed]

    Upcoming Talks and Conferences

    [pending COVID-19]

    Matt Chalmers

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