The Seminar on Culture and Religion in Antiquity (formerly the Seminar on Ancient Judaisms and Christianities) is devoted to exploring the context and interplay of religious traditions in the ancient world, both through formal paper presentations and lively dialogue. The theme for each cycle is determined by our steering committee, as well as suggestions from seminar participants. Seminar themes generally run in two-year cycles, and are designed to be broad enough to incorporate a wide range of scholarly interests. The temporal focus of the seminar is the fifth century B.C.E. to the fifth century C.E.
Members of the seminar include professors, research scholars, and graduate students from the Greater Toronto Area, and are affiliated with departments of Classics, Jewish Studies, Religion, and Ancient and Near Eastern Studies.
SCRA is grateful to the Centre for Jewish Studies, Emmanuel College of Victoria University, and the Department for the Study of Religion for their co-sponsorship and support during 2011-2012. The seminar invites interested scholars and students to present papers, participate, and
contribute. Please contact Tim for more details.
Judith Newman
Organizer
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John W. Marshall
Organizer
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Hindy Najman
SCRA Co-Founder & Organizer
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John S. Kloppenborg
SCRA Co-Founder & Organizer
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Andreas Bendlin
Steering Committee Member
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Sarianna Metso
Steering Committee Member
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Timothy Langille
Student Organizer
Tim Langille is a fourth year PhD student at the Centre for the Study of Religion and the Centre for Jewish Studies. His areas of research are Second Temple Judaism, early Christianity, and the Holocaust. His dissertation will focus on the formation of collective identity through cultural memories of trauma. |
Sarah Rollens
Student Organizer
Sarah Rollens is a third year PhD student at the Centre for the Study of Religion. Her research focuses on Christian origins, and her dissertation will examine the strategy of the social critique in the Q document. Her secondary research interests include early Christian identity formation, the historical Jesus, ancient Galilee, the Synoptic Problem, method and theory in the study of religion, and urban-rural interaction in antiquity. |
Nathalie LaCoste
Student Organizer
Nathalie LaCoste is a second year doctoral student in the Centre for the Study of Religion working in collaboration with the Centre for Jewish Studies. Her research interests include Hellenistic and Second Temple Judaism, Biblical wisdom traditions, and Hellenistic philosophy. She is currently thinking about conceptions of water in Jewish ritual life in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt using Ritual and Diasporic studies as a lens of analysis. |
Madison Robins
Student Organizer
Madison Robins is a second year doctoral student at the Department for the Study of Religion and the Centre for Jewish Studies. Her research is in the areas of Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity. She is also interested in post-colonial/diaspora studies and translation. |
Amy Marie Fisher
Student Organizer
Amy Marie Fisher is a second year PhD student at the Department for the Study of Religion, as well as a collaborator with the Centre for Jewish Studies. She is interested in Second Temple and early Rabbinic Judaism, Early Christianity, and the influx of Greek and Roman religious practice and myth into the Near East. She is interested in each tradition’s creation and maintenance of sacred spaces. She approaches this topic both materially, through archaeology, and literarily, through aetiologies. The divine’s specific role and form of manifestation in these narratives currently intrigues her. |
Judith H. Newman (A.B. Princeton, M.A.R. Yale, PhD Harvard) is Associate Professor of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at Emmanuel College, holds a joint appointment with the Department and Centre for the Study of Religion, and is cross-appointed to the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. Her current research interests are in ritual studies and the formation of communities in early Judaism and Christianity, method in the study of the Bible, and Jewish-Christian relations. She is currently at work on a monograph, The Liturgical Imagination, about the intersection of scripture, ritual performance, and prayer in early Judaism and Christianity. She serves as editor for the SBL Early Judaism and Its Literature Monograph Series.
John Marshall (B.A. Waterloo, M.A. Laurier, Ph.D. Princeton) has been an Assistant Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion since 2000. His graduate study at Princeton in religions of late Antiquity generated an abiding interest in religious boundary crossing in the ancient world. His research makes use of ancient literary sources to address social-historical questions in the history of Second Temple Judaism and the development of early Christianity. Currently, he is particularly interested in Apocalyptic Literature, Methodology and ideology in the study of ancient Judaism and Christianity, the colonial context of early Christianity and thus post-colonial theory in its relation to historical-critical methodology.
Hindy Najman (M.A., Ph.D., Harvard) is Associate Professor in the Department and Centre for the Study of Religion, and Director of the Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Toronto. She is currently the editor of the theme issues of Dead Sea Discoveries and editor-in-chief of the Journal for the Study of Judaism Supplement Series. Her publications include Seconding Sinai: The Development of Mosaic Discourse in Second Temple Judaism (2003), a forthcoming book, Prophetic Ends: Concepts of the Revelatory in Late Ancient Judaism, and articles on the Scrolls, biblical studies and Hellenistic Judaism.
John S. Kloppenborg (M.A., Ph.D., St. Michael’s College, Toronto) is a Professor and Chair of the Department and Centre for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. His areas of research are Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity. His most recent publications are Q: The Earliest Gospel (Westminster/John Knox 2008) and The Tenants in the Vineyard: Ideology, Economics, and Agrarian Conflict in Jewish Palestine (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006). He teaches in the areas of parables, Synoptic gospels, social history of early Christianity, and is currently working on a commentary on the parables of Jesus, a collection of inscriptions of professional, cultic, and ethnic associations in Mediterranean antiquity, and a commentary on the letter of James.
Andreas Bendlin (M.A. Tübingen, M.A. Hon., D. Phil. Oxford, Dr. habil. Erfurt) teaches Roman History in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga and in the Graduate Program in the Department of Classics at the University of Toronto. Professor Bendlin's research focuses on religion in Greco-Roman antiquity, with a particular emphasis on the religious traditions of Rome and the Roman Empire. He is also working on Roman social, cultural and literary history. His current research projects include a monograph on the religious cultures in Late Republican Roman society.
Sarianna Metso is Associate Professor in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations and the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto. Her area of scholarship is Hebrew Bible with special focus on the Dead Sea Scrolls. She is the author of The Textual Development of the Qumran Community Rule (Brill, 1997) and The Serekh Texts (T&T Clark, 2007), and co-editor of two fragmentary manuscripts of the book of Job found at Qumran for the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series (DJD XVI; Clarendon, 2000). Additionally, she has written over 30 articles on various aspects of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible, particularly on issues of ancient Jewish legislation, community identity development, and methodology of historical reconstruction.