Maria Doerfler | Emory University School of Law | Atlanta, GA

Maria Doerfler, Associate Professor of Late Antiquity in the Religious Studies Department at Yale University. She holds degrees in the areas of political science, law, and religion from Duke University, Fuller Theological Seminary, UCLA, and Princeton. Prior to joining the Yale faculty, she taught at Duke Divinity School and served as director of the Duke/UNC Center for Late Ancient Studies. Her work focuses on hermeneutics in the areas of law, philosophy, and scripture, during the period of the 2^nd through 6^th centuries C.E. In particular, her scholarship examines how crises in personal or communal contexts shape interpretive strategies. Her most recent 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 work in the area of law and religion also extends to the Christian reception of Roman law as well as to issues of gender, asceticism, and the construction of sacred history.