Stephen J Davis

Yale University, Religious Studies, Faculty Member

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Stephen Davis is Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies, and Professor of History at Yale University, with secondary affiliations in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the Program in Medieval Studies. His primary expertise lies in the history of ancient and medieval Christianity, with a special focus on the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. Since 2013, he has served as Head of Pierson College, one of fourteen residential colleges at Yale. Previously, he lived and taught in Egypt where he served as academic dean and professor of New Testament and early church history at the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo (ETSC), the official Arabic-language seminary of the Coptic Evangelical (Presbyterian) Church, Synod of the Nile. His areas of teaching and research include: monasticism; pilgrimage and the cult of the saints' the history of biblical interpretation and canon formation; apocryphal literature; Egyptian Christianity, the Coptic language (including epigraphy and papyrology); Christianity in the Arabic-speaking world and its relation to Islam; early Christian archaeology; visual and material cultures; gender studies; and the application of anthropological, sociological, and literary methods in the study of historical texts. He is founder and executive director of the Yale Monastic Archaeology Project (YMAP), which has sponsored archaeological research at four different sites in Lower and Upper Egypt. As an extension of this work, he also directs a Project to Catalogue the Coptic and Arabic Manuscripts at a fifth monastic site, Dayr al-Suryān. In addition, he is the founding editor of the Christian Arabic Texts in Translation (CATT) series published by Fordham University Press.
Phone: 203-432-1298 (office)
Address: Yale University
Pierson College
261 Park Street
New Haven, CT 06511

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Books by Stephen J Davis

The Gnostic Chapters: A Critical Edition and Translation of Evagrius Ponticus’ Kephalaia Gnostika in Arabic (Arabic Christianity: Texts and Studies 5. Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).

Catalogue of Coptic and Arabic Manuscripts in Dayr al-Suryān. Volume 4: Arabic Ascetic Discourses (with contributions by Mark N. Swanson) (Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, Subsidia; Leuven: Peeters, 2022).

Catalogue of Coptic and Arabic Manuscripts in Dayr al-Suryān. Volume 3: Arabic Theology (co-authored with Mark N. Swanson) (Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 694, Subsidia 143; Leuven: Peeters, 2022).

Catalogue of Coptic and Arabic Manuscripts in Dayr al-Suryān. Volume 2: Arabic Commentaries and Canons (with contributions by R. N. Marcos, S. Moawad, T. C. Schmidt, and Cyril V. Uy II) (Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 678, Subsidia 140; Leuven: Peeters, 2021).

Catalogue of Coptic and Arabic Manuscripts in Dayr al-Suryān. Volume 1: Coptic and Arabic Biblical Texts; Coptic Language Resources, including Biblical Lexica (Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 677, Subsidia 139; Leuven: Peeters, 2020).

The Feast of the Desert of Apa Shenoute: A Liturgical Text from the White Monastery (co-edited by D. Schriever and M. Farag, with contributions by S. Moawad). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 681, Scriptores Coptici 53. Leuven: Peeters, 2020.

An edition and translation of a trilingual manuscript recording the rite of a medieval liturgical... more An edition and translation of a trilingual manuscript recording the rite of a medieval liturgical procession at the White Monastery in Upper Egypt, with two introductions. Primarily in Coptic, with selected sections in Greek and Arabic, the text includes rubrics of biblical passages and a sermon by Shenoute meant to be read at different points during the procession.

Revelation 1–3 in Christian Arabic Commentary: John's First Vision and the Letters to the Seven Churches (co-authored with T. C. Schmidt and Shawqi Talia) (Christian Arabic Texts in Translation, Volume 1; New York: Fordham University Press, 2019).

Monasticism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

An introduction to monasticism in a global historical context, with special attention to Christia... more An introduction to monasticism in a global historical context, with special attention to Christian, Buddhist, and Jain traditions. Chapters address the definition of monasticism; the diversity of monastic practices; monastic rules, social organization, and gender; saints’ stories as sources of spirituality; the archaeology of monasteries and attitudes toward place; and the changing role of monasticism(s) in the contemporary world.

Christ Child: Cultural Memories of a Young Jesus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).

A Disputation over a Fragment of the True Cross: A Medieval Arabic Text from the History of Christian-Jewish-Muslim Relations in Egypt [Critical edition with introduction, translation, and notes by Stephen J. Davis, Bilal Orfali, and Sam Noble] (Beirut: Dar el-Machreq, 2012).

Stephen J Davis

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