ABOUT

I am a scholar of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and the literature, religions, and history of ancient Israel.

Since 2004, I have taught at the University of Virginia, where I am currently an Associate Professor. I have held visiting professorships at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, where I also developed a joint global humanities program with the University of Virginia. From 2011–2019, I served as Associate Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, the largest such department at a public university in North America. 

I was born and raised in New York City. I received my B.A. from Yale University (English Literature & Language), my M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School, and my Ph.D. from Harvard University (Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations). I currently live in Charlottesville, Virginia with my family and other animals.

Public Humanities

I have recently published a short course with Audible, called Writing The Bible, which explores the question, “Who wrote the Bible?” For more information about Writing The Bible, please see here for the course and here for a description and supporting materials.

I also write short articles for Bible Odyssey (an NEH-funded non-sectarian public education website). 

Research Labs

For the last several years, I have co-directed, with Kurtis Schaeffer, the Religion, Race & Democracy Lab (and co-hosted its signature podcast, Sacred & Profane, which is available on this website, on iTunes, and a bunch of other platforms).

I’m also co-directing, with Willis Jenkins and Kurtis Schaeffer, an interdisciplinary collaborative of scientists and humanities scholars, called Sanctuaries, which explores how climate change bears on sacred sites; conducting multi-disciplinary inquiry at protected, contested places across the world—from Yellowstone to Bhutan—together we investigate how Anthropocene stresses are reshaping cultural landscapes.

Academic Writing

My academic writing has focused on the Babylonian Exile and the concepts of “exile,” “forced migration,” and “diaspora” in the Bible and early Judaism. My first book, Enduring Exile, charts the transformation of exile from a historically-bound and geographically-constrained concept into a symbol for physical, political, and spiritual distress. I am continuing this work by co-editing, with Mark Hamilton, the Oxford Handbook on Biblical Exile (forthcoming 2023). 

More recently, I’ve been swept up by biblical poetry and how it says what cannot otherwise be said. My primary project is a commentary on the Song of Songs—an extended erotic love poem in the Hebrew Bible. On the side, I’ve been preparing a popular book on the biblical book of Job (much of which is in poetry) and its interpretation. 

For more on my academic writing, see here.

My CV is available here.

You can contact me at maht at virginia (dot) edu