Stephen J. Shoemaker

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Stephen J. Shoemaker, a professor of religious studies at the University of Oregon, is a specialist on the history of ancient and early medieval Christianity and early Islam. His research focuses on early Byzantine and Near Eastern Christianity and, more specifically, on early devotion to the Virgin Mary, Christian apocryphal literature, and Islamic origins.

Shoemaker is writing a monograph that situates the rise of Islam within a broader trajectory of imperial apocalypticism that emerged in late ancient Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism. Among other things, this perspective explains how the Qur’an’s fervent belief in the imminent end of the world coincides with the importance that Muhammad and his earliest followers placed on worldly conquest and imperial expansion. The political eschatologies of early Byzantine Christianity and Judaism and Sasanian apocalyptic literature show that imperial ambition often went hand in hand with beliefs about the end of the world, thus offering contemporary precedent for the imperial eschatology that seems to have fueled the rise of Islam. This integration of formative Islam with the religions of Mediterranean late antiquity offers an invaluable perspective for understanding the beginnings of Islam at a time when historical sources are generally scarce and often highly problematic.

Shoemaker has previously been awarded fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Advanced Study, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He earned his PhD in religion from Duke University.