Faculty
Kimberley C. Patton
Professor of the Comparative and Historical Study of Religion
- AB, Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges
- AM, PhD, Harvard University
- telephone: (617) 496-3395
- office: 502 Andover
- faculty assistant: Carol Edwards
- faculty assistant telephone: (617) 495-4519
- assistant’s office: Andover 306
Kimberley Patton specializes in ancient Greek religion and archaeology, with research interests in archaic sanctuaries and in the iconography of sacrifice. She also teaches in the history of world religions, offering courses in cross-cultural religious phenomenology. These comprise ritual studies, the mythology of natural elements, religious art and iconoclasm, the interpretation of dreams, animals in religion and myth, ritual weeping, material holiness, and funerary cult. She is involved in the ongoing discussion in the academy of the goals and methods of comparative study. She is the author of The Sea Can Wash Away All Evils: Modern Marine Pollution and the Ancient Cathartic Ocean (Columbia, 2006) and the forthcoming Religion of the Gods: Ritual, Paradox, and Reflexivity (Oxford, 2007). She is also co-editor of and contributing author to three other books: with Benjamin Ray, A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age (Berkeley, 2000); with John Stratton Hawley, Holy Tears: Weeping in the Religious Imagination (Princeton, 2005); and with Paul Waldau, A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics (Columbia, 2006).