Abigail Emerson is a fourth-year Hebrew Bible/Old Testament PhD student in Duke’s Graduate Program in Religion. She earned a BA with distinction from Yale University in 2014 and an MA in Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity (tannaitic midrash halakhah) from the University of Virginia in 2020. She studies both Bibles as material objects and also biblical rhetorics of text provenance: speeches quoted, tablets smashed, scrolls inscribed. In the summer of 2021, she represented Duke’s Manuscript Migration Lab at the Authoritative Texts and their Reception Research Group at the University of Oslo under the Lab’s director Jennifer Knust. She and Knust also co-authored an exhibit in Perkins Library on MS 013, a holding in the Rubenstein’s Hebrew manuscript collection. Her dissertation will focus on divine quotation in the book of Leviticus and its function as a rhetoric of text provenance.
Related courses
- RELIGION 156: Scripture: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
- RELIGION 190FS: The Bible in America
- RELIGION 145: Old Testament/Hebrew Bible