Faculty

Laura S. Nasrallah

Assistant Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity

Laura Nasrallah came to Harvard in 2003 from Occidental College in Los Angeles. In her research and teaching, she emphasizes issues of colonialism, gender, status, and politics in the production and ancient history of interpretation of New Testament and early Christian writings, contemporaneous literature, archaeological materials. Her book An Ecstasy of Folly: Prophecy and Authority in Early Christianity focuses on 1 Corinthians and on materials from the second- and third-century controversies over prophecy and the nature of the soul. Her newest book project reads early Christian literature within the built environment of the Roman Empire. Using postcolonial and critical geographical theory, she brings together literary and archaeological materials in order to study discussions of geography, representations of humans and gods in statuary, and the nature of true religiosity in the first to fourth centuries. Her other research focuses on the politics of reuse of objects and sacred space and on developing methodologies for the use of archaeology in New Testament studies. These projects and others lead to a special interest in Acts, Revelation, second-century apologists, and Paul and his afterlife in the cities to which he wrote. A project funded by the Office of the Provost focuses on uses of the New Testament in U.S. popular culture and politics, and she is currently organizing two conferences in collaboration with other scholars: "From Roman to Early Christian Thessalonike: A Conference in Religion and Archaeology" and "Race and Ethnicity in New Testament and Early Christian Studies."