Graduate Students
Gail E. Armstrong
Early Christianity
B.A. The Pennsylvania State University; M.A. New York University
Interests include social history of earliest Christianity, Judaism and the religions of the Greco-Roman world with an emphasis on issues relating to women and gender and group/self identity. She is also interested in methods and theories in the study of religion. Exams taken: Christianity in the Early Empire: Paul, Women, and Gender; Christianity in Late Antiquity: Heresy and Asceticism. Her dissertation, which focuses on The Acts of Philip, is "under construction". For 2006-07 Gail is the Stonehill Teaching Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at Stonehill College, MA.
Debra Scoggins Ballentine
Ancient Judaism
B.A. and M.A. The University of Georgia
Interests include the Hebrew Bible in its Ancient West Asian context, NW Semitic languages and comparative historical grammar, ancient Canaanite and Mesopotamian religions, and the use of mythological topoi throughout the biblical anthology.
Matthew L. Duperon
Religion and Critical Thought
Religion B.A. College of William and Mary, Asian Studies M.A. Cornell University. Matt studies early Chinese religion and philosophy, as well as modern theory of religion and ethics. He is particularly interested in ideas of self-cultivation and human flourishing present in the early Daoist and Confucian traditions on the one hand, and in the Pragmatist philosophy of William James and John Dewey on the other. He is in his last year of coursework and will begin writing preliminary exams next year. He also has tangential interests in Chinese and Western alchemy, as well as the uniquely modern self-cultivation phenomenon of self-help literature. He enjoys running, practicing Kung Fu, and rides a bike to work every day, rain or shine.
Paul J. Firenze
Religion and Critical Thought
B.A. University of Texas at Austin; M.A. Mississippi State University; M.A. University of Chicago Divinity School. Research interests include religious ethics, religion and politics, and religion and the culture of capitalism.
Aaron Glaim
Ancient Judaism
My interests are the history of the family in late antique rabbinic Judaism.
Omar Haque
Religion and Critical Thought
Interests include: religious experience/mysticism, cognitive and evolutionary approaches to religion and anthropology, method and theory in the study of religion, islamic philosophy and theology, moral psychology, philosophy of mind, personal identity, neuroethics, ethics at the end of life, cognitive neuroscience, Darwinian medicine, science and religion"
Alissa A. Macmillan
Religion and Critical Thought
philosophy of religion
Lori McCullough Veilleux
Religion, Culture, and Comparison
B.A. Hendrix College; M.A. Vanderbilt University
Lori's coursework at Brown is highly interdisciplinary. In addition to
religious studies, she takes courses in anthropology, American civilization,
history, and sociology to pursue interests in religion and crisis in modern
America, religion in Africa, and conversion in the global environment. This
summer, Lori will teach a course entitled "The End of the World as We Know
It," which introduces students to religion and culture through popular
apocalyptic film. She enjoys playing games of intellect and chance, sewing,
and sitting in the "religious studies booth" at the local student pub on
Friday evenings.
Brian Rainey
Religion Comparison and Culture
2004 B.A. Brown University (Ancient Studies), 2007 M.Div. Harvard Divinity School
Brian is interested in questions of power, representation and interpretation in Ancient Israel. He hopes to draw from a wide variety of theoretical traditions in the study of the Hebrew Bible, including psychoanalysis, the hermeneutic tradition, and sociology. His areas of inquiry include: conflicts between reformers and traditionalists in ancient Israelite religion, conceptualizations of grief, tragedy and horror in the biblical and Ancient Near Eastern world, and the politics of biblical interpretation.
Paul M. Robertson
Early Christianity
BA Classics/Religion Reed College 2006. Main fields of study: Hellenistic philosophy, particularly early Stoicism and Cynicism; New Testament, with emphasis on Paul's letters; early Syriac literature; late antique studies, encompassing social history and the writings of the so-called Church Fathers, especially Gregory Nazianzus; later Greek and Byzantine studies.
Current research interests: Hellenistic philosophical tropes in both ancient and late antique literature, including both Gospel literature as well as early Syriac texts; praxis, broadly constituted as a counterpoint to recent scholastic emphases on community, with focus on both the abstract (eros) and the particular (Cynicism); paleography in early Medieval texts and transmission.
Miguel A. Segovia
Contemporary Religious Thought
M.A. Boston College ; M.Div. Harvard. Areas of interest include the history of political theory, feminist social criticism, and ethics; comparative philosophies of liberation; theories of religion, culture, and ritual; the moral psychology of fiction and realism in the novel; nineteenth and twentieth century Continental philosophy, especially conceptions of "the subject," inter-subjectivity, and agency; African American and Chicana/o fiction, history, and literary criticism; phenomenology of gender and race; recent interventions in queer theory, cultural studies, and postcolonial feminisms. Exams: "Philosophy of the Subject: Critical Perspectives on Agency, Power, and the Politics of Experience"; "Political Philosophy: Democracy and Difference"; "Moral Philosophy and Christian Ethics: Love, Justice, and the Ethics of Care"; "Modern Christian Thought: Praxis and Identity in Liberation Philosophies and Political Theologies." His dissertation will explore literary theory, especially narrative theory, and theories of social criticism and will wrestle with self/other relations vis-à-vis questions about the nature of love and social justice and the ethico-political value of the imagination, knowledge, moral understanding, and the emotions in literatures of the Americas.
Jennifer E. Singletary
Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean
B.A. Boston University; M.A. The Pennsylvania State University; M.A. Brown University Interests include Ancient Mesopotamian and Ancient Israelite historiography, geography and ethnography, Semitic philology, Greek historiography, and literary theory.
Daniel C. Ullucci
Early Christianity
B.A. Boston University; M.A. Brown University. Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Classics, University of Pennsylvania; Certificate in Papyrology, American Society of Papyrologists.
Dan's research addresses the relationships between emergent Christian groups and wider Greek and Roman religion, culture, and philosophy. His interests include: Greek and Roman sacrificial practice and discourse, Christian anti-sacrificial discourse, the development of the text of the New Testament, and papyrology. His dissertation "The End of Animal Sacrifice" examines the relationship between Greek and Roman anti-sacrificial rhetoric and the Christian rejection of animal sacrifice. Dan is a Brown/Wheaton Faculty Fellow for 2007-8.
Josh K. Vaillancourt
Religion and Critical Thought
M.A. Brown University, B.A. St. Michael's College. Josh's interests are somewhat diverse in theory and philosophy of religion. They include: the scientific study of religion (e.g. cognitive science, evolutionary psychology); religious apologetics and anti-religious polemic; religion and values/valuing; conceptions of souls and afterlives. Graduate study is for Josh a balancing act between school and family life with his wife and son, a toddler. He also enjoys cooking, fiction writing, and video games (finally, thankfully, having retired from long-time obsession, Final Fantasy XI).
Robyn F. Walsh
Early Christianity
A.B. Wheaton College (2002); M.Div. Harvard (2005)Robyn's research interests include traditions related to John the Baptist, the letters of Paul, feminist/womanist theories and ethics, the Roman catacombs and marine archaeology. While at Harvard, she spent many months in Greece, Turkey and Israel conducting research for Helmut Koester's "Archaeology in the New Testament World" project and co-authoring a chapter on Thessaloniki in his publication Cities of Paul (2004). Her work on the Thasian statue of Theagenes for Koester and Kimberley Patton was included in Patton's recent publication: 'The Sea Can Wash Away All Evils': Modern Marine Pollution and the Ancient Cathartic Ocean (2006) and was an inspiration for Robyn's recent SBL paper "Temple Treasury Plundering in Antiquity" (2006). Her research and translation work is featured in Franois Bovon's reissue of Luc le thŽologien (2006). More recently, she traveled to Rome with Nicola Denzey to assist in her research for the recent publication The Bone Gatherers: The Lost Worlds of Early Christian Women (2007).
Heidi K. Wendt
Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean
Heidi Wendt completed an undergraduate degree in Religious Studies at Brown and an MTS at Harvard Divinity School where she also completed substantial coursework in Roman art history and archaeology. Her program is highly interdisciplinary and focuses on the second and third-century cults of the Roman empire, including early Christianity. Heidi is interested in relationships between Roman and provincial religions, particularly, in Roman strategies for negotiating the 'foreign' ritual practices and spaces with which they came into contact through imperial expansion. She has participated in archaeological projects throughout Italy, Greece, and Turkey.
Stephen L. Young
Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean
B.A. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Ancient History; English Literature); MAR Westminster Theological Seminary (Biblical Studies), ThM (Hebrew Bible). Stephen's primary interests revolve around studying ancient Hellenistic and Greco-Roman culture and "religious," focusing particularly on Early Judaism and early Christianity. For some time he has researched Paul and also the reception, appropriation, and construction of his writings and identity(ies) by various ancient people and groups. He also studies Hellenistic and Greco-Roman thought and sensitivities concerning cosmology, the "heavenly" realm, the interaction between people and the divine realm, and ideologies of gender, ethnicity, and the body-and especially the intersection of these areas in "religious" practices and their social significance.