Staff profile

My research interests lie in the history of late antique Christian literature in Greek and Syriac, particularly the biblical commentaries and homilies of the late antique Near East (200-550 CE), religion and initiation, power and ideology issues, and Syriac manuscript culture.

I have recently published a monograph, Re-envisioning Theodore: Theodore of Mopsuestia’s Biblical Exegesis in His Catechetical Homilies (Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 185), which is a revised version of my dissertation. After obtaining a Ph.D. in Theology from KU Leuven in 2022, I was a visiting researcher at Wolfson College, Oxford, where I studied pre-Christian sources of some Greco-Syriac baptismal metaphors. The article The Furnace Remains the Womb: Revising Baptismal Syrian Metaphors in Light of Pre-Christian Sources and Women’s Studies, which resulted from this research stay, received the Eusebius Essay Prize 2024.

 The research project I am currently working on is titled “Power and ‘Otherness’: Situating Late Antique Near Eastern Biblical Exegesis in the Empire.” This project lies at the intersections of Syriac Studies, biblical patristic exegesis, and postcolonial criticism. Taking the perspective of postcolonial theory, my project explores the way how Near-Eastern bilingual authors (Eusebius of Emesa, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and Theodoret of Cyrus), ethnically Syrians but writing only in Greek, ‘othered’ the biblical images or ‘Jews’ and ‘pagans’ in their commentaries on Christian Scripture.