Brown University

Faculty Member, Religious Studies

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 was named as a finalist for the American Academy of Religion's Best First Book in the History of Religions.


Nicola teaches at Brown University in the Department of Religious Studies.

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