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2009-10 Research Associates and Visiting Faculty

Benjamin Dunning

Visiting Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Early Christian History

Benjamin Dunning is Assistant Professor of Theology at Fordham University and teaches in the areas of New Testament, early Christianity, contemporary theory, and gender studies. After receiving his doctorate in the study of religion from Harvard University in 2005, he served as director of undergraduate studies in religion at Harvard College from 2005-06. He has been a professor at Fordham since 2006 and currently serves as co-chair of the Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in Pre-Modern Christianity Consultation in the American Academy of Religion.

Dunning's first book, Aliens and Sojourners: Self as Other in Early Christianity, is forthcoming in 2009 from the University of Pennsylvania Press. In the book, he investigates why and to what end early Christians spoke about themselves as resident aliens, strangers, and sojourners, asserting their "otherness" as a fundamental part of being Christian. The book also explores the markedly different ways that Christians put the rhetoric of their own marginality to use in order to situate Christian identity variously in relation to the Ancient Roman world.

While at Harvard Divinity School, Dunning will be working on a book manuscript analyzing the theological significance of sexual difference and gendered embodiment in second- and third-century Christian thought. He is specifically interested in the ways in which the text of Genesis and the theological anthropology of the Apostle Paul fueled, shaped, and also constrained early Christian approaches to the issue. Articles related to this project have appeared in the Journal of Religion and the Journal of Early Christian Studies.

Photograph courtesy Benjamin Dunning.