Stephen Davis

 
A.B., Princeton University;
M.Div., Duke University, The Divinity School;
M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., Yale University.

Stephen Davis is Professor of Religious Studies, History, and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University, specializing in the history of ancient and medieval Christianity, with a special focus on the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. Since 2013, he has served as Head of Pierson College, one of fourteen residential colleges at Yale. Previously, he lived and taught in Egypt where he served as academic dean and professor of New Testament and early church history at the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo (ETSC), the official Arabic-language seminary of the Coptic Evangelical (Presbyterian) Church, Synod of the Nile. 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 Islam; early Christian 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 Lower and Upper Egypt. As an extension of this work, he also directs a Project to Catalogue the Coptic and Arabic Manuscripts at a fifth monastic site, Dayr al-Suryān. In addition, he is the founding editor of the Christian Arabic Texts in Translation (CATT) series published by Fordham University Press.