About the Project

Claudia Dorit Bergmann

Prof. Dr. Claudia D. Bergmann is Professor of Biblical Theology at Paderborn University, Germany, where she specializes in Hebrew Bible, biblical interpretation, and religious rituals. She earned her Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible from the University of Chicago. Her research explores biblical narratives, gender, ritual practices, and the reception of sacred texts across historical and cultural contexts. She is co-editor of Imitating Abraham: Ritual and Exemplarity in Jewish and Christian Contexts (Brill, 2025) and co-director of the Sarah–Hagar Project, an international collaboration examining the interpretation and reception of these figures across religious traditions.

Thomas R. Blanton IV

Dr. Thomas R. Blanton IV is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Theology and Religious Studies and the 2025–2026 Tuohy Fellow at John Carroll University. He earned his Ph.D. in Biblical Studies from the University of Chicago. His research focuses on early Christianity, Second Temple Judaism, Greco-Roman religion, and the relationship between religion and economic life in antiquity. He is the author of A Spiritual Economy: Gift Exchange in the Letters of Paul of Tarsus (Yale University Press, 2017) and co-editor of Imitating Abraham (Brill, 2025). He co-directs the Sarah–Hagar Project with Claudia D. Bergmann, fostering international and interdisciplinary scholarship on these foundational religious narratives.

Project Description

Sarah and Hagar in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Traditions

From their first appearances in the Hebrew Bible through innumerable (re)interpretations in subsequent millennia, the figures of Sarah and Hagar have provoked reflection on the life cycle, fertility, conception, and childbirth; resource allocation, inheritance, and enslavement; sustaining life in precarious environments; group solidarity and partition; sex, gender, and ethnicity; and imagined relations between human and non-human entities, gods, angels, and demons. Across historical epochs and geographic regions, Sarah and Hagar have been like mirrors in which individuals and communities have found meaning and support.

The project comprises an ongoing series of lectures and discussions, and is expected to culminate in the publication of an edited volume to complement previous work in Claudia D. Bergmann and Thomas R. Blanton IV., eds, Imitating Abraham: Ritual and Exemplarity in Jewish and Christian Contexts (Brill, 2025), https://brill.com/display/title/71766.

Get Involved

Thomas R. Blanton and Claudia D. Bergmann welcome participation in and contributions to the ongoing lecture series, and proposals for articles to be included in the planned volume. All those interested in the myriad ways in which the legacies of Sarah and/or Hagar are drawn upon in Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, and in literature, poetry, art, music, and media from antiquity to the present are welcome to participate in the project. To propose a lecture or article contribution for the project, please contact Claudia D. Bergmann (cdb@mail.uni-paderborn.de) or Thomas R. Blanton IV (tblanton@jcu.edu).

Previous Events (Spring 2025 & Fall 2025)

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