February 25, 2019
Yale Divinity School Dean Greg Sterling announced today that Laura Nasrallah, currently Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School, will join YDS and Yale’s Department of Religious Studies next year as Professor of New Testament.
“Yale has a long-standing tradition of excellence in New Testament that stretches back from recent faculty such as Harry Attridge and Adela Yarbro Collins to Abraham Malherbe and Wayne Meeks and beyond to Leander Keck, Paul Minear, and Paul Schubert,” Sterling said in an email to the Divinity School community. “I have complete confidence that Professor Nasrallah will continue Yale’s and the Divinity School’s tradition of exemplary New Testament scholarship and teaching.”Nasrallah’s research focuses on bringing together New Testament and early Christian literature with the material remains of the Mediterranean world. Her major works include “An Ecstasy of Folly”: Prophecy and Authority in Early Christianity (Harvard, 2003), Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture: The Second-Century Church Amid the Spaces of Empire (Cambridge, 2010), and Archaeology and the Letters of Paul (Oxford, 2019). In addition, she has co-edited Prejudice and Christian Beginnings: Investigating Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Early Christian Studies (Fortress, 2009) and From Roman to Early Christian Thessalonikē: Studies in Religion and Archaeology (Harvard, 2010). She is working on a commentary on 1 Corinthians for the Hermeneia series and the completion of a co-edited volume titled From Roman to Early Christian Cyprus. In addition, Professor Nasrallah has published 20 scholarly articles and book chapters, with several more at press or under review.
Sterling said Nasrallah will become the successor to Harry Attridge, an acclaimed New Testament scholar and Sterling Professor of Divinity at YDS. Attridge is in phased retirement and will complete his Yale career at the end of the 2019-2020 academic year. Nasrallah’s appointment, Sterling said, brings a two-year search process to fruition and solidifies Yale as “an indispensable place for the study of the New Testament.”