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I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Religions and Cultures and faculty member of the Center for Jewish Studies, Religious Studies, and the department for Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (affiliated faculty)  at the University of Minnesota. Prior to my appointment at Minnesota, I was Associate Professor of Old Testament Studies at the MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion, and Society  in Oslo (2007–2013). I am a co-founder of the Society of Biblical Literature program unit Metaphor Theory and Hebrew Bible which I chaired from  2012-2016.

My research centers around the academic study of the Hebrew Bible. My areas of specialization are women and gender studies, metaphor theory, the book of Isaiah, narrative readings of biblical texts, questions  concerning death  and death wishes, and more recently use of the bible in contemporary literature..

 My first book, Silent or Salient Gender? The Interpretation of Gendered God-Language in the Hebrew Bible, Exemplified in Isaiah 42, 46 and 49 (Mohr Siebeck, 2008), won an international book award, the John Templeton Award for Theological Promise. This book contributes to the study of gender and metaphor in biblical research. 

My new book The Death Wish in the Hebrew Bible: Rhetorical Strategies for Survival (Cambridge  University Press, 2021) is the first monograph to systematically investigate the many texts in the Hebrew Bible in which a literary character expresses a wish to di.  In this book I employ narrative theory and conversation analysis to demonstrate how death wishes, once viewed as speech utterances, serve several powerful rhetorical strategies.  

The Death Wish in the Hebrew Bible was awarded the R. B. Y. Scott Award, 2023. This award recognizes an outstanding book in the areas of Hebrew Bible and/or the Ancient Near East written in English or French by a member of the CSBS and published in the current and previous two years

I am currently working on a new project on the use/reuse of Bible in contemporary dystopian literature. 

Dystopian literature has received considerable attention lately as it has “achieved symbolic cultural value in representing our fears and anxieties about the future." (Adam Stock, Modern Dystopian Fiction and Political Thought.) Yet how this literature utilizes biblical ideas and material has been less explored, even though a significant portion of contemporary dystopian and post-apocalyptic novels draw heavily on biblical literature. The research project Bible in the Dystopian World seeks to open a dialogue between dystopian (and post-apocalyptic) literature and biblical texts. 

Here is a link to a lunch talk on my new research: MF CASR Lunch, 29 March 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsuI61CauhM

This site provides information about my research and other academic endeavors.