Harvard University

Faculty Member, The Study of Religion

About

Nicola Denzey Lewis received her B.A. in Religious Studies from the University of Toronto in 1991. She continued on a five-year Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities to graduate work at Princeton University, where she received her M. A. in 1994 and Ph.D in 1998 from the Department of Religion and the Program in the Ancient World. Her dissertation, Under a Pitiless Sky: Cosmology and Conversion in Selected Second-Century Sources was advised by an interdisciplinary committee of Elaine Pagels (Religion), John Gager (Religion), Edward Champlin (Classics) and Peter Brown (History).

Nicola has continued her interdisciplinary focus, publishing articles on early Christian cosmology and "Gnosticism" and late antique history. She has also maintained a commitment to creative pedagogy and teaching excellence in the area of New Testament, and has published a variety of articles on the Bible and Film, and teaching the New Testament. She served for three years on the American Academy of Religion's Teaching and Learning Committee, and has contributed actively to the Society of Biblical Literature's initiatives on teaching technologies.

Nicola's second area of focus is the social history of Rome from the second to the fifth centuries. To this end, she published The Bone Gatherers (Boston: Beacon Press) in 2007. The Bone Gatherers received high praise, including being named as a finalist for the American Academy of Religion's Best First Book in the History of Religions.

Nicola is currently at work on two book projects. The first, Under a Pitiless Sky, is an extensive revision of her dissertation. It will appear with Brill Publishers in Leiden. The second is a Handbook to Nag Hammadi, intended to be a guide for the perplexed non-specialist readers of Nag Hammadi and other so-called "Gnostic" documents. Nicola is also beginning research on a third book, on Roman curiosity objects.

Nicola divides her time between teaching at Harvard and Brown Universities, where her husband Thomas A. Lewis teaches full-time in the Department of Religious Studies. They live in Providence, Rhode Island and have two children, Lola and Isobel.

Contact Information

Email:

Homepage: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~csrel/people/faculty/denzey_nicola.html

Address: Committee on the Study of Religion
Harvard University
12 Quincy Ave
Cambridge, MA
02138

Telephone: (617) 384-8432