Stephen Davis

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

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. For ten years, from 2013 to 2023, he served as Head of Pierson College. 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. As an extension of this work, he also directs a Project to Catalogue the Coptic and Arabic Manuscripts at a fifth site, Monastery of the Syrians (Dayr al-Suryān), resulting in four published catalogue volumes, with five more volumes either in press or in preparation (CSCO Subsidia; Peeters 2020– ). In addition, he is the founding editor-in-chief of the Christian Arabic Texts in Translation (CATT) series. His 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), as well as four other monograph-length editions/translations.