Sara Parks
Sara Parks is Assistant Professor in Religious Studies (Early Christianity). She joined St FX in the fall of 2022. She was formerly Assistant Professor in New Testament at Dublin City University, and before that was a Leverhulme Fellow and Assistant Professor in New Testament Studies at the University of Nottingham. Sara’s PhD in Early Judaism and Historical Jesus is from McGill University (2016), where she also did an MA in New Testament and Christian Origins. Her recent books are Gender in the Rhetoric of Jesus (Lexington/Fortress 2019) and Jewish and Christian Women in the Ancient Mediterranean (with Shayna Sheinfeld and Meredith Warren; Routledge 2022). She teaches and researches the literature and artefacts of Second-Temple Judaism and early Christianity, with a special interest in gender, the history of women, and the dynamics of inner-Jewish and anti-Jewish polemics. She is also interested in the reception of those texts and ideas in literature and worldviews today. Sara is committed to inclusive pedagogies and accessible scholarship, and has won awards for both teaching and mentorship.
Ancient Jewish Insider and Outsider Polemics, Ancient Mediterranean Religions, Apocalypticism, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, Aware-Settler and Settler-Colonial Approaches, Biblical Studies, Christian Origins, Early Christianity, Early Judaism, Gender, Gospels, Hermeneutical Lenses, Historical Jesus Research, History of Anti-Judaism, History of Misogyny, Intersectional Feminist Approaches, Modern Reception of the Bible, New Testament Studies, Pauline Studies, Q Source, Women in the Ancient Mediterranean World
Here are a few recent publications and media appearances. For my full CV, visit https://hcommons.org/members/saraparks/
Books
S. Parks. Jewish and Christian Women in the Ancient Mediterranean. London: Routledge, 2022. Co-authored with Meredith Warren and Shayna Sheinfeld.
S. Parks. Gender in the Rhetoric of Jesus: Women in Q. Lanham: Lexington Fortress, 2019.
Articles and Chapters
S. Parks. “Women and Gender in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha.” The Oxford Handbook to the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. Edited by G. Oegema, 477-497. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.
S. Parks. “Bernadette Brooten: Outstanding Among 125 Years of Women in the SBL.” Lectio Difficilior 1/2020.
S. Parks. “Margaret Atwood’s Survival and Prophetic Canadian Nationbuilding.” In “Who Knows What We’d Ever Make of It, if we Got our Hands on It?”: Margaret Atwood and the Bible. Edited by Rhiannon Graybill and Peter Sabo. Piscataway: Gorgias, 2020. Co-authored with Anna Cwikla.
S. Parks. “‘The Brooten Phenomenon’: Moving Women from the Margins in Second-Temple and New Testament Scholarship.” The Bible and Critical Theory 15/1 (2019): 46–64.
Public Scholarship (Videos and Interviews)
What Do Historians Say about Mary Magdalene?” https://youtu.be/t6RvQc_rFHs
“Jewish and Christian Women in the Ancient World,” Ancient Afterlives. https://anchor.fm/ancientafterlives/episodes/S2E1---Jewish-and-Christian-Women-in-the-Ancient-Mediterranean---Sara-Parks--Shayna-Sheinfeld-and-Meredith-Warren-e1aro20
“Women in the Gospels and What Jesus Learned from Them,” with Sara Parks and James McGrath. Talk Gnosis. https://youtu.be/IrdwssEPKaw
“The Silent Women of the New Testament, with Sara Parks and Lavinia Cerioni,” The Centre for Applied Theology, Living Liturgy Forum. https://youtu.be/ntOZFLEu3NM
“Why Study the Resurrection with Sara Parks,” Why Study Series, University of Nottingham. https://youtu.be/eTv-kB5wC8c
“Interview with Sara Parks,” Ideas of Jesus Video Podcast, Episode 3. https://youtu.be/efYO2k9yFr0
“Interview with Sara Parks,” ReligionProf podcast. https://www.patheos.com/blogs/religionprof/2020/01/religionprof-podcast-with-sara-parks.html
“Jesus in Q: Women are as Valuable as Men,” Early Christian Texts: The Bible and Beyond podcast. https://earlychristiantexts.com/jesus-taught-women-are-as-valuable-as-men/
Philippe Vaillancourt, “La Vierge et Marie Madeleine, une hypersexualisation aux antipodes (entrevue avec Sara Parks),” Présence: Information Religieuse, May 2, 2019. http://presence-info.ca/article/culture/la-vierge-et-marie-madeleine-une-hypersexualisation-aux-antipodes
