Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou
Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion
Extension: 4290
Telephone: 01392 724290
Francesca studied Theology at the University of Oxford, where she also completed her doctorate. She spent a further three years teaching and researching in Oxford, first as a Junior Research Fellow at Worcester College and then as the Career Development Fellow in the Faculty of Theology, before joining Exeter's Department of Theology and Religion in 2005.
Research
Her research is primarily focused on ancient Israelite and Judahite religions, and portrayals of the religious past in the Hebrew Bible. Her doctoral thesis explored the misrepresentation of the past in the Hebrew Bible and was published as King Manasseh and Child Sacrifice: Biblical Distortions of Historical Realities (de Gruyter, 2004). Her most recent book, Land of Our Fathers: The Roles of Ancestor Veneration in Biblical Land Claims (T&T Clark, 2010), furthers her somewhat morbid interests by examining the relationship between the veneration of the dead and territorial claims in the Hebrew Bible. Thanks to a research grant from the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council), she is now writing a book about the corpse and its social and religious impacts upon the living.
She has edited a volume on ancient Israelite and Judahite religions (with John Barton, University of Oxford) called Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah (T&T Clark, 2010) and another on environmental readings of biblical texts, called Ecological Hermeneutics (with her Exeter colleagues David Horrell, Cherryl Hunt and Chris Southgate; T&T Clark, 2010). Further projects underway include a book about the deities Baal and Asherah, a two-volume commentary on the book of Kings and a volume introducing students to the socio-religious world of the Hebrew Bible. She is also co-editor of a new series of books focusing on biblical characters, called Biblical Refigurations, published by Oxford University Press.
Alongside her specialism in ancient Israelite and Judahite religions, her research interests include social and religious responses to the dead; kingship in ancient West Asia/Near East; history and ideology in the Hebrew Bible; methods of historical reconstruction; constructs of ‘popular’ and ‘official’ religion; and ‘secular’ approaches to teaching and learning in biblical studies.
Media
Francesca's media work includes presenting a three-part BBC documentary series about the Bible and archaeology, called Bible's Buried Secrets, broadcast in the UK on BBC 2 in March 2011, and 'talking head' contributions to various television documentaries. She has also appeared as a panelist on BBC1's debate show, The Big Questions, and has discussed biblical scholarship on several radio programmes.
Supervision and teaching
She supervises a number of postgraduate research sudents, whose topics include ritual humiliation in Judah and the Hebrew Bible; gender conflict in Ezra-Nehemiah; God's penis; the portrayal of the Queen of Heaven in the Bible and scholarship; an ecological reading of the book of Leviticus; queer theory and the marriage metaphor in prophetic literature. Francesca also teaches a range of Hebrew Bible modules. At a postgraduate level, these include Deities, Demons, Monsters, and Monotheism and Experiencing the Divine in Ancient Israel: Ritual, Practice and Cult. Undergraduate modules currently include The Divine World in the Hebrew Bible; Life and Death in Ancient Israel; Introducing Biblical Hebrew and Intermediate Biblical Hebrew.
Networks
Francesca currenty serves as secretary of the national Society for Old Testament Study and is a member of the European Association of Biblical Studies and the Society of Biblical Literature.
