Denise Buell

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

As an assistant professor of religion at Williams College, Denise Buell specializes in the New Testament, early Christian history, and feminist Biblical interpretation. In her book Making Christians: Clement of Alexandria and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy (Princeton University, 1999) she examined the rhetorical functions of metaphors of procreation and kinship in early Christian texts.

As a Radcliffe Fellow at the Bunting, Buell will work on the manuscript, “‘Why This New Race?’ Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity.” In this book, Buell will challenge the way in which ethnicity and race have been defined and interpreted in relation to Christianity in the second and third centuries. By examining the intersections of ethnicity and religion, Buell hopes to shed new light on Christian-Jewish, Christian-imperial, and intra-Christian relations.

Buell earned her PhD in religion from Harvard University. She received three Mellon Fellowships to support her graduate and doctoral dissertation work.