2023-24 New Faculty

Virginia Burrus is the Bishop W. Earl Ledden Professor of Religion at Syracuse University and the Croghan Visiting Professor at Williams College in the fall of 2023. Her research, writing, and teaching centers on Christianity in Late Antiquity, with special focus on gender, sexuality, and the body; martyrdom and asceticism; ancient novels and hagiography; and ecocritical approaches to ancient Christian texts and artifacts. Her most recent books are Ancient Christian Ecopoetics: Cosmologies, Saints, Things (Penn Press, 2019); The Lives of Saint Constantina (Oxford UP, 2020, with Marco Conti and Dennis Trout); Byzantine Tree Life: Christianity and the Arboreal Imagination (Palgrave, 2021, with Thomas Arentzen and Glenn Peers), and Earthquakes and Gardens: Saint Hilarion's Cyprus (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2023). She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and lives in Bennington, VT.