I am interested in the disruptive potential of non-"standard" forms of Christianity and Judaism for constructing new vistas to understand "religions" in their ancient contexts. Beyond the need for careful textual and literary analysis, I also emphasize the need to defamiliarize and render contingent scholarly categories and metanarratival tools. My current work proceeds from these positions and prioritizes contextual analysis as a way to mutually illuminate a range of individual corpora.
My current research focuses on the disembedding of the concept of "prophethood" among various communities in late antique Syro-Mesopotamia and their converging concepts of revelatory knowledge. I look primarily at literature from late antique Syro-Mesopotamia, especially those preserved in Hebrew, Syriac, Greek, and Coptic.
My other project focuses on a comparative analysis of late antique Manichaeism and Rabbinic Judaism, not so much for their "doctrinal" content, but in terms of trans-local movement, technologies and ideologies of ordering knowledge, and exploring the Sasanian imperial context.
