Kim Haines-Eitzen

Paul and Berthe Hendrix Memorial Professor

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:

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

In the news

303 White Hall
kjh10@cornell.edu

Departments and programs

Classics
Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program
Jewish Studies Program
Medieval Studies Program
Near Eastern Studies
Religious Studies Program
Society for the Humanities

Affiliated Colleges

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Keywords

early Christianity; women's studies; biblical studies; early Judaism

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