Joanna Homrighausen

 Joanna Homrighausen is a Ph.D. candidate (ABD) in Religion (Hebrew Bible) at Duke University and has taught at William & Mary since 2021. Her dissertation, Writing Esther, unpacks the materiality of the Esther scroll in Judaism and shows how Jews have used the written artifact to think through pivotal theological questions raised by the Book of Esther. In both her dissertation and her classes, she is intrigued by the Bible as a library of books emerging from human histories, questions, and traumas, and by how people have inhabited, used, and abused its stories and language to make sense of and construct their own lives.

In her other scholarly life, she writes on religion and the arts, especially contemporary calligraphy and lettering arts. She is the author of Planting Letters and Weaving Lines: Calligraphy, the Song of Songs, and The Saint John’s Bible (Liturgical Press, 2022) and Illuminating Justice: The Ethical Imagination of The Saint John’s Bible (Liturgical Press, 2018), as well as articles in MAVCOR Journal, Religions, Hebrew Studies, Postscripts, Religion and the Arts, Journal of Interreligious Studies, Image, The Visual Commentary on Scripture, The Christian Century, and the Oxford Encyclopedia of Religion and the Arts.

Courses:

• HBRW 101-102 Elementary Biblical Hebrew 
• HBRW 201-202 Reading the Bible in Hebrew
• RELG 203 History and Religion of Ancient Israel
• RELG 150 The Book of Esther: Gender, Empire and Genocide
• RELG 150 Biblical Journeys: Jewish and Christian Pilgrimage Past and Present