Michael Penn

Associate Professor of Religion

Specialization: Early Christianity; Biblical studies; church history; early Judaism; gender studies; ritual studies; methodology in religious studies

Michael Penn is a specialist in biblical studies and the history of early Christianity. He explores how early Christian communities forged their identity, especially in the context of religious and ethnic pluralism. His current research investigates the reactions of early Eastern Christians to the rise of Islam.

Penn has published articles in the Journal for the Study of Pseudepigrapha, Ecclesiastical History, Islamochristiana, Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Journal of Early Christian Studies, Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies, Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy, and Coptic Church Review, Studia Patristica, Aramaic Studies in Judaism and Early Christianity, Interdisciplinary Approaches to Islam, and Teaching the Bible. He has also contributed reviews to the National Women's Studies Journal, Review of Biblical Literature, and Church History.. He has also contributed reviews to National Women's Studies Journal, Review of Biblical Literature, and Church History.

Penn is the recipient of a Kraft-Hiatt Postdoctoral Fellowship in New Testament and Early Christianity; a J. B. Duke Fellowship; a United States Information Agency Fellowship for the Cairo, City of Islam Program; an NEH Summer Fellowship; a Wabash Center Grant for Teaching and Learning; an NEH Faculty Seminar Grant; and a Goethe Institute Fellowship for Summer German Study.

As an undergraduate at Princeton University, Penn studied molecular biology. He previously held research positions at Apple Computers, the Weizmann Institute (Israel), Palo Alto Veterans Hospital, and Ames Research Center, NASA.

Before coming to Mount Holyoke, Penn was a postdoctoral fellow at Brandeis University and taught religion at Haverford College, Bryn Mawr College, and Duke University. He has also been a secondary school teacher; for six years he was the director of forensics at Durham Academy High School, where he ran a nationally competitive high school debate team.

Penn's class offerings include courses in the Hebrew scripture and the New Testament and seminars such as What Didn't Make It into the Bible, Women and Early Christianity, and Sex and the Early Church.

News Links:

"Christian-Muslim History Not All Hostile," Boston Globe, June 12, 2007

"MHC Professor Penn Wins Guggenheim," Office of Communications, April 26, 2007

"Professor Penn on Gospel of Judas," USA Today, April 6, 2006