02/28/2024
Today we are spotlighting Dr. Barbara Thiede!
Dr. Thiede has had quite the experience in academia, having attended the University of Illinois-Urbana (B.A), University of Missouri-Columbia (M.A., PhD in history), University of North Carolina Charlotte (2nd MA in Religious Studies), and the University of Bonn, Germany. 🎓
She has had two academic careers. The first was in modern European history. Dr. Thiede says, “I wrote my first MA on the American Jewish response to the Holocaust and my PhD on liberal peace movements of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s in Germany and the United States. In those days, I published in Peace Studies.”
“I left academia for a little over a decade and when I returned, I decided to pursue a second MA degree in Religious Studies. I was trained as a historian of the twentieth century. It might, therefore, be fairer to say that Religious Studies chose me. There is something magical about the questions that arise in Religious Studies – they can address the meaning of life in ways I find endlessly compelling.”
Her research deals largely with the depiction of masculinity in biblical texts. Her first two books, Male Friendship, Homosociality and Women in the Hebrew Bible: Malignant Fraternities and R**e Culture in the House of David: A Company of Men, both reflect this interest. Her third book, Yhwh’s Emotional and S*xual Life in the Books of Samuel: How the Deity Acts the Man, continues that work, though there is much more focus on male-on-male sexualized violence in biblical literature than in the first two books. Her fourth book, Texts of Trauma: Scholars’ Reflections on R**e, R**e Culture, and the Bible, will contextualize the work of prominent scholars of sexual violence in biblical texts. Dr. Thiede currently teaches God and S*x in the Hebrew Scriptures/Old Testament and Religion and Magic.
She is currently reading: a classic in my field, God’s Phallus, by Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, as well as A Fine and Private Place, by Peter Beagle.
A fun fact about Dr. Thiede: her favorite food is an Ethiopian dish, misir wat. She also grows her own vegetables and composts everything she can! 🥕🥬
Who would you like us to spotlight next?
