Joan R. Branham

WSRP Research Associate 2001–02
Acting Director of the Women's Studies in Religion Program 2007–08

Home institution

Providence College

Research projects

Sacred Space as Gendered Space: Women, Blood, and Sacrifice in Late Antiquity (2001-2002)

This project examines visual and textual representations of women and sacred spaces, focusing on the problematic substance of blood—reproductive and sacrificial—as it governs the relationship of gender and sacrality in early Christianity and late-antique Judaism.

Ritual, Gender, and Space in the Jerusalem Temple, Ancient Synagogues, and Early Churches (2007-2008)

This project examines late-antique Jewish and Christian strategies to contend with the Jerusalem Temple tradition, including its gendered and spatial constructions. The literary and material mapping of temple space onto early churches and synagogues—and even onto ritualized bodies operating within them—reveals a variety of rhetorical and iconographical endeavors to reject, reinterpret, and appropriate the powerful influence of the Jerusalem forerunner.

WSRP lectures

Mapping Sacrifice on Bodies and Spaces in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity (2007-2008)

Courses

  • HDS 1896: Sacred Space and Gendered Space: Seminar (Fall 2001)
  • HDS 1881: Ritual, Gender, and Space in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity (Spring 2008)