Stephen Davis

Stephen J. Davis is Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies and Professor of History at Yale University, specializing in the history of ancient and medieval Christianity, with a special focus on the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. He is also an affiliate faculty member in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and Medieval Studies. For ten years, from 2013 to 2023, he served as Head of Pierson College and served one term as the Chair of the Council of Heads of College (CHC). Prior to coming to Yale, he lived and taught in Egypt where he served as a professor and academic dean at an Arabic-language theological college in Cairo. His areas of teaching and research include: monasticism; pilgrimage and the cult of the saints, the history of biblical interpretation and canon formation; apocryphal literature; Egyptian Christianity, the Coptic language (including epigraphy and papyrology); Christianity in the Arabic-speaking world and its relation to medieval Judaism and Islam; archaeology; visual and material cultures; gender studies; and the application of anthropological, sociological, and literary methods in the study of historical texts. He is founder and executive director of the Yale Monastic Archaeology Project (YMAP), which has sponsored archaeological research at four different sites in Egypt since 2006. As an extension of this work, he also founded and directs a Project to Catalogue the Coptic and Arabic Manuscripts at a fifth site, Monastery of the Syrians (Dayr al-Suryān). This work has resulted in four published catalogue volumes, with two additional volumes in press and three more in an advanced stage of preparation (CSCO Subsidia; Peeters 2020– ). His solo-authored books include The Cult of St. Thecla: A Tradition of Women’s Piety in Late Antiquity (Oxford UP 2001), The Early Coptic Papacy (AUC Press 2004), Coptic Christology in Practice (Oxford UP 2008), Christ Child: Cultural Memories of a Young Jesus (Yale UP 2014), Monasticism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP 2018), and The Gnostic Chapters (Brill 2023). He is also the founding editor-in-chief of the Christian Arabic Texts in Translation (CATT) series for Fordham University Press, for which he has recently completed a book manuscript entitled The Guide to the Psalms: How to Make Effective Use of the Arabic Bible. His next research project will be a book on cultural heritage practice, drawing on archaeological and archival ethnographies and his twenty-plus years of fieldwork in Egypt.

Publications

The Gnostic Chapters (Brill) 

Monasticism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP)

Christ Child: Cultural Memories of a Young Jesus (Yale UP)

Coptic Christology in Practice: Incarnation and Divine Participation in Late Antique and Medieval Egypt (Oxford UP)

The Early Coptic Papacy: The Egyptian Church and Its Leadership in Late Antiquity (AUC Press)

The Cult of St Thecla: A Tradition of Women’s Piety in Late Antiquity (Oxford UP)