Tina Shepardson, professor of Early Christianity in the Department of Religious Studies, was recently awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She will use the 2016-17 fellowship year to work on her third book, A Memory of Violence: The Radicalization of Religious Difference in the Middle East (431-750 CE). For this project she is studying religious violence and persecution in the Middle East, with a focus on the development of the Syrian Orthodox Church. Her scholarship hopes to shed new light on this historical example of Christian conflict, radicalization, and schism, while also helping us better understand religious conflict today.
Shepardson previously received a 2009-10 ACLS Fellowship, a 2009-10 American Academy of Religion Individual Research Grant, a 2008 NEH Summer Stipend, and a 2008 Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society. She is the author of two other books on early Christianity — Controlling Contested Places: Late Antique Antioch and the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy and Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem’s Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria. Shepardson has already presented research for her new project at national and international conferences in South Africa and Oxford. She was also awarded a Lindsay Young Professorship in 2015.