Teaching Philosophy

My teaching is multidisciplinary, involving literature, history, art, archaeology, film, and technology. It empowers students to be not merely consumers of information, but also producers of knowledge by incorporating student-initiated projects, active-learning activities, and experiential learning and field trips. It incorporates and deeply engages primary sources in order to provide a critical, analytical, and historical study of religion. Additionally, it requires attention to different theoretical approaches and methods. In my teaching, I address the challenges of understanding antiquity in a world oriented to the present by exploring historical continuities between the past and the present, as well as by interrogating modern concepts (such as gender, social class, race, etc.) by examining the past.

Scholarly Interest

I am a cultural historian of religion, with a primary focus on Christianity in the Late Antiquity period.
I have three major, active research projects: a monograph, Monks and Their Children; a co-edited volume with Catherine Chin of UC Davis, Melania: Early Christianity through the Life of One Family; and a digital humanities project, Coptic SCRIPTORIUM. I am also working on essays on social media and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife Fragment, Digital Humanities and colonized cultural heritage, and the historiography of early Christian studies.

RELI 25 New Testament/Christian Origins
RELI 104 Religion of the Pharaohs
RELI 130 Christian Tradition
RELI 39/ENGL 39 Introduction to Digital Humanities
RELI 143 Religion, Race, and Justice in the US