Russell Lecture topic is gender and religion 3/30/05
The annual Willis Russell Lecture in History, sponsored by the Division of Human Studies at Alfred University, will be held at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 14, in Nevins Theater. This year's speaker is Ross S. Kraemer of Brown
University, who has titled her lecture "Religion and Gender in the Ancient Mediterranean." The lecture and a reception following the talk are open to the public, free of charge. Kraemer is a professor of Religious Studies at Brown
University, where she specializes in ancient Christianity and aspects of ancient Judaism, with particular attention to women and to gender studies. A graduate of Smith College, she received her Ph.D. in Religion from Princeton University. Best known, perhaps, for her 1992 book, Her Share of the Blessings: Women's Religions Among Pagans, Jews and Christians in the Greco-Roman World, published by Oxford University Press, Kramer has published numerous articles on Jewish and Christian women in the Greco-Roman period, as well as several on ancient Jewish inscriptions and Jewish identity. Her more recent books include Women's Religions in the Greco-Roman World, A Sourcebook (Oxford University Press, 2004); an anthology edited with Mary Rose D'Angelo, Women and Christian Origins (Oxford, 1999), and Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books and the New Testament (Houghton Mifflin, 2000; Eerdman's, 2001 [paper], for which she served as New Testament editor, and wrote over 80 entries. She is also the author, with William Cassidy, professor of Human Studies at Alfred University, and Susan L. Schwartz, of The Religions of Star Trek (Westview Press, 2002).
