Congratulations to Mark Scott (McMaster BA 2001), who was promoted to Full Professor and tenured at Stonehill College as of July 1, 2026.
https://www.stonehill.edu/news/details/stonehill-college-celebrates-faculty-appointments/
Congratulations to Adele Reinhartz (PhD 1983) on being elected president of the Society for New Testament Studies. Her presidential address, which she recently delivered at the annual meeting, was entitled “Old Wine into New Wineskins? The New Testament and/within Jewish Studies.”
Congratulations to Andy Perrin (PhD 2013) on being awarded a SSHRC Insight Grant for a new five-year research project, “Daniel in Ancient Jewish Scribal Imagination.” The project will re-examine the formation, development, and shape of the Daniel tradition in light of the Dead Sea Scrolls discoveries at Qumran. Andy also presented “The Qumran Papyri Corpus and the Scribal Development of the Daniel Tradition on 6QpapDaniel” at the annual meeting of the European Association of Biblical Studies in Leuven in July.
Check out Ralph Korner’s (PhD 2014) recently published essays, “Is the Grandson of Ben Sira the Tendentious Translator of LXX Isaiah 23–27 into an Actualized Prophecy that is an Ideological Critique of Ptolemaic Oniad and Seleucid Worldviews?” in Ancient Jewish Texts and Greek Culture: Accommodations and Appropriations (2nd c. BC – 1st c. AD) and “Paul’s Ekklēsia Communities: Are They Imitative or Transgressive of Dēmokratia in the Greek East?” in Early Christianity in Civic Space!
https://www.peeters-leuven.be/detail.php?search_key=9789042956742&series_number_str=46&lang=en
https://www.peeters-leuven.be/detail.php?search_key=9789042956889&series_number_str=343&lang=en
Matthew Pawlak (MA 2016, Cambridge PhD 2020) recently took up a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Vienna’s Faculty of Protestant Theology, where he will join the project on “Mockery and Torture in Passion Narratives and their Ancient Contexts.”
Robert Revington (MA 2018; TST PhD 2023) recently published an essay titled “Death of Christian Canada? Does Arthur Leonard Griffith’s Testimony Support Stuart Macdonald and Brian Clarke’s Theory of Canadian Church Decline in the 1960s?” in History Matters: A Festschrift in Honor of Stuart Macdonald.
https://wipfandstock.com/9798385276165/history-matters/
Michael Johnson (PhD 2019), together with Noam Mizrahi, co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Ancient Judaism dedicated to Susanna and the Elders. Check it out here:
https://brill.com/view/journals/jaj/17/2/jaj.17.issue-2.xml
John Van Maaren (PhD 2019) presented “If Righteousness Died Through the Law, Then Christ Died for Nothing: Galatians 2:21 Reconsidered,” at the annual meeting of the European Association of Biblical Studies in Leuven in July.
Gerjan Altenburg (PhD 2022), assistant professor at St. Francis Xavier University, recently published “Voyeurism at the Abbey: R v Jack Hillie III” in Buddhism, Law & Society.
https://brill.com/view/journals/bls/bls-overview.xml
Matthew Trafford (MA 2023) recently reviewed John Gray’s The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism for the Philosophical Inquiry in Education.
https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/pie/2026-v33-n1-pie010920/1126356ar/
Congratulations to Marc Lodge Andrew Lagace (PhD 2025) on the publication of his book, Hare Krishna in China, in the Routledge Religion in Contemporary Asia Series!
https://www.routledge.com/Hare-Krishna-in-China/Lagace/p/book/9781041287506
Congratulations to James Benn on being awarded a SSHRC Insight Grant over six years for his project entitled “Locating Chinese Religions in the Verse of the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE)”!
Check out Ph.D. student Marwan El Gaddafi’s article, “Québec’s Bill 9 doesn’t just ban symbols — it bans obligations,” published in The Conversation:
https://theconversation.com/quebecs-bill-9-doesnt-just-ban-symbols-it-bans-obligations-286820
Hanna Tervanotko presented “Gender, Context, and Biblical Interpretation: Reflections from Finland and Canada,” at the annual meeting of the European Association of Biblical Studies in Leuven in July.
Congratulations to MA student, Adrienne Tondreau, on becoming an assistant editor at Written in the Waves, an online journal dedicated to spotlighting women’s research on the Atlantic world, in the fields of history, anthropology, folklore, and multimedia!
https://writteninthewaves.substack.com/
PhD student Xiaowen Zhou presented a paper entitled “The Demons Within: Reinterpreting the Fifteen Demon-Deities in Late Ming Jiangnan” at the Asian Studies Conference Japan (ASCJ) 2026, held at Sophia University in Tokyo in early July.
Again, we encourage you to submit updates, whether academic accomplishments or significant personal news, so that we can share it with the entire McMaster Religious Studies community, both past and present. Updates should be sent to the following email: MacReligiousStudies@gmail.com
Matt Thiessen Chair, Department of Religious Studies
Chair's Newsletter, Departmental News
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