Katie Brown

Katie Brown is a PhD Candidate in Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in ancient Mediterranean religions. Her dissertation, "The Last Act of Freedom: Gendering Noble Death in Jewish and Roman Antiquity (c.150 BCE–165 CE)," argues that the suffering or dying body functioned as a site for the performance of gender and a stage upon which idealized conceptions of ethnic identity were constructed. Its central thesis is that the discourse of Gendered Noble Death was a shared ideological mechanism through which diverse sources negotiated hegemony, sovereignty, identity, and morality in a period of political and cultural upheaval—and that the efficacy of these deaths was governed by intersectionality, with variables such as age and social standing deployed by authors to amplify or diminish the performance of gender. Central to her work is the conviction that Second Temple Judaism must be understood as a dynamic participant in the wider Mediterranean koine, shaped by and in dialogue with the cultural, political, and literary worlds around it.

 

Her broader research interests encompass funerary and mortuary rituals, socio-political approaches to suffering and martyrdom, Second Temple and early rabbinic Judaism, Roman religion(s), and early Christianity. Her article "'This is Truly the Savior of the World': An Intersectional Empire-Critical Approach to John 4:1–42," focusing on Jewish-Samaritan relations in this New Testament pericope, is forthcoming in Biblical Interpretation.

 

Katie holds a Master of Arts from the University of Texas at Austin, as well as a Master of Letters in Biblical Studies and a Bachelor's degree in World Religions and Classical Civilization from Trinity College Dublin. In 2021 she conducted research at the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem through an Erasmus grant.

 

During her fellowship at the University of Virginia, Katie looks forward to sharing her research, particularly on the death of Jephthah's daughter in Pseudo-Philo's Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum. She is also developing a noble death database as a digital humanities resource in support of her dissertation, and she welcomes the opportunity for feedback on the database's continued development. She is eager to engage with faculty and students in the Jewish Studies Program and hopes that her interdisciplinary approach will contribute to and enrich the department's existing intellectual community.