Maria E. Doerfler serves as Associate Professor of Late Antiquity n Yale University’s Department of Religious Studies. Before joining the Yale faculty, she held the position of Assistant Professor of Christianity in Late Antiquity at Duke Divinity School, as well as serving as director of the Duke/UNC Center for Late Ancient Studies. Her work focuses on the interpretation of authoritative texts, of law, philosophical writings, and scripture, in the second through sixth centuries C.E., with particular emphasis on how contexts of personal or communal crisis shape exegesis. Her first monograph, Jephthah’s Daughter, Sarah’s Son: The Death of Children in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 2020), won the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book in the History of Religions Prize. Her most recent book, Death and the Afterlife in Syriac Christianity: Creating Social Identity and Emotional Communities appears with the University of Cambridge Press this fall.
In addition to finalizing a volume on the intersection of writing law and creating sacred histories, she is also working on Cambridge Elements on Law and Religion in Late Antiquity and New Religious Movements and Law in the United States. Her next major project deals with migration and ritual in late antiquity—a topic she has already begun to broach in articles for the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of Early Christian History, and elsewhere. She serves as a McDonald Distinguished Senior Fellow at Emory University’s Center for Law and Religion, as editor, inter alia, of Church History and the Review of Biblical Literature. She holds a Ph.D. in Early Christianity from Duke University, a J.D. from UCLA, and a B.A. in political science from Princeton University.