Comparative Ancient Religious Studies

Jennifer Quigley is an Assistant Professor of the New Testament at Vanderbilt University. Her research lies at the intersections of theology and economics in New Testament and early Christian texts. She has interests in archaeology and material culture, and her research and teaching are influenced by feminist and materialist approaches to the study of religion. Her first book, Divine Accounting: Theo-economics in Early Christianity, asks: how did early Christ-followers use financial language to articulate and imagine their relationship to the divine, and how does this language compare to the broader social-religious contexts of the ancient Mediterranean? Looking at lease agreements, sale contracts, and a variety of material culture evidence, she demonstrates that in antiquity, people took seriously the possibility of entering into financial relationships with the gods. Her second book project, tentatively titled “The Gendered Economy of Early Christianity,” will explore the diverse ways in which the theological imaginary is entangled with both gender and the economy in the New Testament and early Christian literature.

Andrew Durdin is Assistant Teaching Professor of Religion at Florida State University. His work advances the critical study of religion by examining those sets of cultural practices often gathered together (by scholars and non-scholars alike) and seen as evidence for “ancient religion.” He is particularly interested in how modern scholars deploy the concept of ancient religion in construing and defending larger histories and accounts of Western culture and their theoretical and political commitments in doing so. In pursuing these issues, He focuses on the historical era of the high Roman Empire, the historiography of ancient Roman religion, and various narratives on the interaction of religion and magic in Western antiquity and modernity. He is working on a book tentatively titled Redescribing “Magic”: Discourse, Alterity, and Religion in the Roman World. In this book, I pursue scholarly critiques of the modern category of “magic” and its problematic application to ancient materials. He does so with the goal of developing a more nuanced view of the ways in which the ancient Romans theorized cultural alterity and the social and material circumstances that invited them to do so.