Susanna Drake

Home institution

Macalester College

Research project

Veils and Revelations: Gender and Allegory in Early Christianity

This book-length project will explore the first assessment of textual and material evidence for veiling in the first through fifth centuries, C.E. and the relation between the social history of the veil in late antiquity and the intellectual history of the concept of truth as veiled/revealed in early Christianity.

Course

HDS 2024: The Veil in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam

Profile

Susanna Drake joins the Women's Studies in Religion Program from Macalester College, where she teaches courses in Religious Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She received her PhD in Religion from Duke University in 2008 and a MTS from Harvard Divinity School in 2003. She specializes in the history of early Christianity, including the study of early Jewish and Christian relations, biblical interpretation in art and text, and understandings of gender and sexuality.

Her book, Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), examines representations of Jewish sexuality in early Christian writings that use accusations of carnality, bestiality, and licentiousness as strategies to differentiate the "spiritual" Christian from the "carnal" Jew. In this and other current projects she is interested in the intersections of Christian ascetic discourse, representations of Jewish and Christian identity, and late ancient attitudes toward gender and sexuality.