Education

• PhD (The Study of Religion), Harvard University
• MTS (New Testament and Early Christianity), Harvard Divinity School
• BA (Classics and Religion), Reed College

Research Interests

I am a historian of the ancient Mediterranean world, with broad interests in the development of Christian literature and culture from the second to sixth centuries CE. My current book project focuses on the various collections of letters attributed to the second-century martyr-bishop Ignatius of Antioch, and the early modern scholarly efforts to whittle these complex and pluriform traditions down into a singular, “reconstructed” text. This project fits in to a broader course of research on the letter and letter collection as literary genres in antiquity, and how modern scholarly taxonomies have parsed ancient epistolary materials into “authentic,” “pseudepigraphical,” and “fictional” documents. I also specialize in Coptic language and literature, and am currently working on a variety of projects relating to the Nag Hammadi Codices (and their modern reception), as well as the Coptic versions of the letters of Ignatius and the Abgar-Jesus correspondence.

Teaching

• Early Christian Literature
• New Testament
• Letters of Paul
• Coptic Language & Literature

Selected Publications

• “Nag Hammadi at Eranos: Rediscovering Gnosticism among the Historians of Religions.” Pages 87–97 and 231–37 in All Religion is Inter-Religion: Engaging the Work of Steven M. Wasserstrom. Edited by Kambiz GhaneaBassiri and Paul M. Robertson. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
• “P.PalauRib.Copt. 5. An Incipits Amulet Featuring Jesus’s Letter to Abgar.” Journal of Coptic Studies 19 (2017): 42–49.
• “‘Finding’ the Gospel of Thomas in Edessa.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 25 (2017): 501–30.
• “Four Texts from Nag Hammadi amid the Textual and Generic Fluidity of the ‘Letter’ in Late Antique Egypt.” Pages 201–20 in Snapshots of Evolving Traditions: Jewish and Christian Manuscript Culture, Textual Fluidity, and New Philology. Edited by Liv Ingeborg Lied and Hugo Lundhaug. Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literature 175. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017.
• “Utility and Variance in Late Antique Witnesses to the Abgar-Jesus Correspondence.” Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 17 (2016): 187–220.