People

ADVISORY COMMITTEE

BERNADETTE JOAN BROOTEN
PhD, Harvard University
BA, University of Portland

Bernadette J. Brooten is Kraft-Hiatt Professor of Christian Studies and of Women's Studies at Brandeis University and a MacArthur Fellow. She has also held fellowships from Harvard Law School, the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and many other granting agencies.

Dr. Brooten directs the Brandeis Feminist Sexual Ethics Project, which is funded by the Ford Foundation. The project, which focuses on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, educates the public through its website, which includes original essays on Islam in English and in Arabic. Because the legacy of slavery continues to shape our thinking about sexuality, the project's current focus is "Slavery's Long Shadow Over Girls and Women." The project's scholars and activists are now researching:

• Enslaved women and girls in early Christianity, Judaism, and Islam
• Early Christian female slaveholders
• Slavery's impact on early Christian sexual ethics
• Christianity's influence on American slavery
• The religious faith of enslaved women and girls
• The legacy of slavery in the United States
• How to create sexual ethics untainted by slave-holding values

Brooten has written Women Leaders in The Ancient Synagogue: Inscriptional Evidence and Background Issues (Scholars Press, 1982) and Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (University of Chicago Press, 1996), for which she received three awards. In addition, she has published articles on Paul and the Jewish Law, Jewish epigraphy, papyrological and literary evidence for Jewish women's power to initiate divorce in antiquity, and various topics of ancient Jewish and early Christian women's history.  

Bernadette Brooten studied Roman Catholic and Protestant theology at the University of Tübingen; Talmud and Jewish history at Hebrew University and the University of Tübingen; and New Testament, ancient post-Biblical Judaism, and early Christian literature at Harvard University, where she completed her PhD in 1982. She previously taught at the School of Theology at Claremont, the Claremont Graduate School, the University of Tübingen, Harvard Divinity School, and the Department of Theology of the University of Oslo in Norway.