Dr. Annemarie Luijendijk

Biography

AnneMarie Luijendijk is the William H. Danforth Professor of Religion and Head of New College West at Princeton University, where she joined the faculty in 2006. As a scholar focused on the New Testament and Early Christianity, she employs papyrology to investigate the social history of early Christianity through literary texts and documentary sources. Her notable works include "Greetings From the Lord: Early Christians and the Oxyrhynchus Papyri" (Harvard University Press, 2008), which explores early Christian papyrus letters from the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus, and "Forbidden Oracles?" (Mohr Siebeck, 2014), which presents a previously unknown 5th-6th century Coptic manuscript titled "The Gospel Lots of Mary" that provides Christian oracular responses. Currently, she is working on a book entitled "Gospels Garbage," which examines the readers and owners of the earliest Christian manuscripts discovered in ancient garbage heaps, shedding light on the practices of discarding such texts. Her research interests have recently expanded to include the papyrus acquisitions of the 1920s as well as themes related to Fashion, Footwear, and Faith in Late Antiquity. Luijendijk specialized in New Testament studies and received her doctorate from Harvard University, Divinity School, in 2005. Between 2013 and 2020, she served as Chair of the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity.

Research Interests