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For media inquiries or to contact a faculty expert, please contact Media Relations:
Phone: 212.854.2037
Email: mediarelations@barnard.edu

Sun Min
Director of Media Relations

Alyssa Vine
Associate Director of Media Relations

Elizabeth A. Castelli

Professor of Religion

Elizabeth A. Castelli is a specialist in biblical studies, early Christianity, and feminist/gender studies in religion.

Her work in biblical studies draws upon contemporary literary theory and cultural criticism. Currently she is especially interested in the "afterlives" of biblical texts — how the Bible is deployed and recycled in contemporary social, political, and cultural expressions and debates. She is exploring biblical afterlives in a new research project on the resurgence of interest among continental philosophers and cultural workers in the biblical letters of Paul, and is the founding editor of the scholarly journal Postscripts: The Journal of Sacred Texts and Contemporary Worlds.

Her research in early Christianity has focused particularly on embodied pieties, especially asceticism and martyrdom. Her recent work on early Christian martyrdom has led to a project that explores U.S. Christian identity politics and Christian internationalism. It focuses on the impact of Christian religious freedom activism on U.S. foreign policy, human rights discourses, and first-world Christian self-understanding.

She has a longstanding academic and activist interest in alternatives to violence, which has most recently inspired a nascent project exploring religiously inflected anti-war performances.

She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and the Journal of Early Christian Studies, and she is an advisory board member of the Center for Religion and Media at New York University.

Prior to entering academia, she worked as Executive Director of the Rhode Island Council on Domestic Violence, a coalition of the state's shelters for battered women. She has also held administrative positions at Brown University and Claremont Graduate School.

Selected Publications

God and Country, special issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, guest editor 18.3 (Fall 2007)

Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004)

Interventions: Activists and Academics Respond to Violence, co-editor with J. R. Jakobsen (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2004)

Reverberations: On Violence, special issue of Scholar and Feminist Online 2:2 (Winter 2004), guest editor, www.barnard.edu/sfonline/reverb

Sexuality in Late Antiquity, special issue of Journal of the History of Sexuality, guest co-editor with D. Boyarin, 10:3-4 (2001)

Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader, editor, with assistance of R. C. Rodman. (New York: Palgrave/St. Martin's Press, 2001)

The Postmodern Bible, co-editor and co-author as a member of the Bible and Culture Collective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)

Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power. Literary Currents in Biblical Interpretation Series (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991)

CONTACT:

Elizabeth A. Castelli
Professor of Religion
Barnard College

212.854.8291

Please cc mediarelations@barnard.edu

EDUCATION:

A.B., Brown University

M.A., Ph.D., Claremont Graduate School