[what does it mean to do justice with history?]
Books
The Lives of Objects: Material Culture, Experience, and the Real in the History of Early Christianity (2020)
Review by Caroline Walker Bynum for Critical Inquiry
Review by Kim Haines-Eitzen for Material Religion
Review by Jay Twomey for The Bible and Critical Theory
Review by Daniel Smith for Religiology
Review by Cavan Concannon for JAAR
Review by Anthony Royle for Reading Religion
Review by Jimmy Hoke for Review of Biblical Literature
Review by Lilah Grace Canevaro for The Classical Review
How Things Feel: Biblical Studies, Affect Theory, and the (Im)Personal (Brill, 2016)
Articles, Essays, and More
Latest:
“The Ethnography of Gender: Reconsidering Gender as an Object of Study” in Studies in Late Antiquity (see here)
“The Blur of Letters, the Residue of Reception,” in Biblical Interpretation (see here)
Others:
Rethinking Early Christian Identity: Affect, Violence, and Belonging (2015)
Review by Kimberly Stratton for Religious Studies and Theology
Review by Jennifer Glancy for Journal of Early Christian Studies
Review by Robert Paul Seesengood for Bible and Critical Theory
Review by Christopher Frilingos for Journal of Religion and Violence
Out now: Volume on theory in the study of late antiquity for the Elements of Religion in Late Antiquity Series/Cambridge University Press.
Lyricism and Knowledge in the Study of Religion (2020)
“Lyricism is creative play, the conceptual opposite of ‘discipline.’ So of course it undermines our disciplinarity.”
“The story of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts – a tale about a hapless Arab peasant who uncovers the buried secrets of early Christianity – has accompanied most scholarly and popular explorations of Nag Hammadi literature. As a colonialist relic, however, it is more than a quirky tale of the accidents of history. It represents and perpetuates the orientalist epistemological tropes that have since been fixed onto the individual texts themselves: seeking/finding, secrecy/unveiling (esoterism), and sexual taboo/sexual excess (asceticism/libertinism).”
Romance and Danger at Nag Hammadi (2012)
Sue Monk Kidd’s The Book of Longings takes inspiration from my translation of Nag Hammadi text, The Thunder: Perfect Mind
Tertullian of Carthage and the Fantasy Life of Power (2020)
“Grounded in and relativized by the colonial matters of Roman Carthage, Tertullian’s writings actually don’t speak to anything particularly or distinctly ‘Christian.’ Tertullian’s Christians, it turns out, are fantastically summoned, too.” (co-authored with Carly Daniel-Hughes)
The Queer Life of Christian Exceptionalism: A response to Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages (2014)
“What a strange turn, what a surprising slip, that Christianity and queerness not only belong to each other, but in tandem may very well amplify the force of more ominous belongings.”
Penetration and Its Discontents: Greco-Roman Sexuality, The Acts of Paul and Thecla, and Theorizing Eros Without the Wound (2018)
“It is worth piecing together in the domains of both history and theory a fuller and more daily account of eros – an erotics of the mundane – in which wounding, while never far from the frame, is neither the prerequisite to pleasure, nor the primary indicator of its realness.”
Queer Persistence: On Death, History, and Longing for Endings (2016)
“Dean, Sedgwick, and the Gospel of Mark together suggest that although history is written by the winners, it is also written by the survivors who have lost a lot, the ones making sense not of the past but of their presence, and their difficult place in the endurance of things.”
Seeing is Feeling: Revelation’s Enthroned Lamb and Ancient Visual Affects (2014)
“The enthroned lamb gives voice to conflicted feelings about imperial life: attachment and loss, extravagant dreams of sovereignty and victory, as well as the painful realities of vulnerability and subjection, all in complex inter-implication.”
Other essays
Sovereignty in Ruins: The Death of Ignatius and Ecologies of Destruction (2017)
But What Do We Call It? The Secret Revelation of John and Crises of Categories (2016)
Babylon’s Fall: Figuring Diaspora in and through Ruins (2015)
The Rhetoric of Intimate Spaces: Affect and Performance in the Corinthian Correspondence (2012)
Co-authored Projects
The Thunder: Perfect Mind
A New Translation and Introduction
co-authored by Hal Taussig, Jared Calaway, Maia Kotrosits, Celene Lillie, and Justin Lasser
Re-reading the Gospel of Mark Amidst Loss and Trauma
co-authored with Hal Taussig
Maia Kotrosits 