Dr. Chontel Syfox will join the Department of Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Fall 2020 as Assistant Professor. Dr. Syfox is an expert on Hebrew Bible, reception history, Second Temple Judaism, rewritten scripture, the Book of Jubilees, Biblical women, feminist interpretation, and theories of gender.
She received her PhD from the University of Notre Dame, where she subsequently served as a Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, before going on to teach at Luther College as Visiting Assistant Professor. Dr. Syfox also holds a Master of Theological Studies degree from Emory University, where she was a Robert T. Jones Graduate Fellow, and a First Class Honors M.A. in Theology from the University of St Andrews.
Dr. Syfox’s work focuses on the early reception and interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in the Book of Jubilees. Her current projects explore the construction of gender in Jubilees’ depiction of the biblical matriarchs, as well as the place of Noah in the text’s medical anthropology. Dr. Syfox was named a national winner of the 2018 Society of Biblical Literature Regional Scholar award for her work on Noah in Jubilees and has published research on the subject in both the English and Chinese languages.
In CANES she will contribute to teaching courses in Ancient Greek language and on topics in classical and biblical literature, such as sexual violence against women in antiquity. She will also contribute to the teaching mission of the Integrated Liberal Studies Program.