Welcome to the webpage of Dr Meredith J C Warren.
I am a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield, where I am the Director of the Sheffield Centre for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies. I also oversee the Embodied Religion research theme. In addition, I am editor in chief of the open-access Journal for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies.
Principally trained in both early Christianity and early Judaism, I approach religion in antiquity from an interdisciplinary perspective that challenges category assumptions about early Christian and Jewish literature. In my research and teaching, my goal is to showcase the intricacies of shared cosmological expectations among the communities of the ancient Mediterranean. I have written often on food and taste in antiquity, and more recently I have undertaken research on gender, including rape culture and Revelation, and an article on slut shaming the Samaritan Woman.
Most recently, I published a co-authored text book with Sara Parks and Shayna Sheinfeld titled Jewish and Christian Women in the Ancient Mediterranean (Routledge 2022). You can listen to our interview with the Ancient Afterlives podcast here, or read an interview with the authors at the Shiloh Project blog.
I have two previous books. Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature (SBL, 2019) defines a genre of transformative ingestion called hierophagy. I use sensory analysis to explore how performative consumption brings about access to other worlds in ancient Mediterranean narratives. My first book, My Flesh is Meat Indeed (Fortress; 2015), evaluates how John 6:51c–58 contributes to the gospel’s presentation of Jesus as divine in light of Hellenistic attitudes about sacrifice, divinity, and the consumption of human flesh.
I am originally from Canada, and grew up in Vancouver, BC. I am settler and Metis, a citizen of the Manitoba Metis Federation, descended from English- and Cree-speaking Metis family from the Red River community of St Clements. My family names are Bruce, Leask, Cochrane, and Garrioch.
