Overview
Kim Haines-Eitzen (Ph.D., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1997) is a Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Religions with a specialty in Early Christianity, Early Judaism, and Religion in Late Antiquity in the Department of Near Eastern Studies. Her most recent book is Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks and What It Can Teach Us (Princeton University Press, 2022), a project that traces how desert sounds shaped early Christian monasticism and includes field recordings she has made in desert environments. She is the author of Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature (Oxford University Press, 2000), a social history of the scribes who copied Christian texts during the second and third centuries; and The Gendered Palimpsest: Women, Writing, and Representation in Early Christianity, which deals with the intersection of gender and text transmission (Oxford University Press, 2012). She is a member of the programs in Religious Studies, Jewish Studies, Medieval Studies, and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell. For the 2024-25 academic year, she is a Fellow at the National Humanities Center where she is working on a new project, tentatively entitled Earth, Wind, and Fire: A Field Guide to the Apocalypse. To learn more about her recent work and her media appearances, visit her website: http://kimhaineseitzen.wordpress.com
Courses Taught
- History and Literature of Early Christianity
- Gnosticism and Early Christianity
- Introduction to Christian History
- The New Testament/Early Christian Literatures
- Sound, Silence, and the Sacred
- Theory and Method in Near Eastern Studies
- Reinventing Biblical Narratives
- Sensational Religion
- Desert Monasticism
Publications
Books and Edited Works
- Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks and What It Can Teach Us (Princeton University Press, 2022)
- The Gendered Palimpsest: Women, Writing, and Representation in Early Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2012).
- Boundaries and Bodies in Late Antiquity, co-edited with Georgia Frank, special issue of The Journal of Early Christian Studies 17 (2009).
- Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power, and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature (Oxford University Press, 2000).
Selected Articles
- “The Sound of Angels’ Wings in Paradise: Religious Identity and the Aural Imagination in the Testament of Adam,” in Jews and Christians in the Greco-Roman World
- “Geographies of Silence,” in Knowing Bodies, Passionate Souls: Sense Perceptions in Byzantium
- "The Future of Patristics," in Blackwell Companion to Patristics
- "The Social History of Early Christian Scribes," in The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research
- “Imagining the Alexandrian Library and a ‘Bookish’ Christianity,” in Reading New Testament Papyri in Context
- “Textual Communities in Late-Antique Christianity” in A Companion to Late Antiquity
- "Engendering Palimpsests: Reading the Textual Tradition of the Acts of Paul and Thecla," in The Early Christian Book
- “The Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles on Papyrus: Revisiting the Question of Readership and Audience,” in New Testament Manuscripts: Their Texts and Their World
- “Ancient Judaism Imagined Through the Lens of Early Christianity: The Work of James Rendel Harris, 1852-1941,” in Studies and Texts in Jewish History and Culture.
- “‘Girls Trained in the Art of Beautiful Writing’: Female Scribes in Roman Antiquity and Early Christianity,” Journal of Early Christian Studies