08/2016 - present
Harvard University, Ph.D. Candidate
General Exams Passed with Distinction

08/2013 - 05/2016
Yale University, Master of Divinity
Henry Hallam Tweedy Award (Highest Prize for Graduates)

08/2008 - 05/2012
Vanderbilt University, Bachelor of Arts
Highest Honors in Religious Studies and Economics

Making Criminals: An Analysis of the Rhetoric of Criminality in the Acts of the Apostles

The Acts of the Apostles is an early second-century text in the New* Testament. This dissertation explores the narrative of Acts and how it characterizes figures and groups as criminalized, a feature of the text that has not previously been assessed. To analyze this feature, this dissertation will place Acts within its broader historical setting through an exploration of contemporaneous Roman legal opinions. This project will also explore scenes of criminalization from other literature with which Acts’ author may be in conversation. My analysis of Acts will be advanced by methods from feminist rhetorical criticism, which helps to carefully investigate the ancient literary and legal milieu of Acts and to consider how its narratives are constructed to persuade and convince. Theoretical frameworks drawn from critical criminology studies, Black feminist thought, and Womanist ethics allow new insights into how Acts’ rhetoric of criminalization functions less to assess behaviors than to characterize certain individuals and groups as criminalized and subhuman. In Acts, not only are the early Jesus followers criminalized but the author of the text deploys the rhetoric of criminality to criminalize others, particularly those it calls Jews.

Forschungsschwerpunkte

New Testament and Early Christianity