Laura Nasrallah, Buckingham Professor of New Testament Criticism and Interpretation at Yale Divinity School, was honored by the University of Oslo with an honorary doctorate at its annual celebration on September 2.
The university recognized Nasrallah for her research and teaching. While in Oslo, she offered a lecture titled “Speaking in Tongues: Testing the Limits of Language in Antiquity and Beyond” and a seminar on the topic of “Justice and Ancestral Fault: What We Might Learn at the Areopagus.”
Laura Nasrallah has been a member of the YDS faculty since 2019, with joint appointment in Yale’s Department of Religious Studies. She served on the Harvard Divinity School faculty from 2003 to 2019.
Nasrallah’s most recent book is Ancient Christians and the Power of Curses: Magic, Aesthetics, and Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2024). The book uses twentieth- and twenty-first century art—particularly the poetry, paintings, and sculpture of contemporary Black artists—as theoretical frameworks for understanding ritual objects and practices from the ancient Mediterranean world.
Her previous books include Archaeology and the Letters of Paul; Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture: The Second-Century Church Amid the Spaces of Empire; and An Ecstasy of Folly: Prophecy and Authority in Early Christianity.
Nasrallah’s publications list also includes several co-edited volumes, and she is the creator of the Letters of Paul website and online course.