AnneMarie Luijendijk

Position
Faculty
Title
William H. Danforth Professor of Religion and Head of New College West
Office Phone
Office
132 - 1879 Hall
Office Hours
Bio/Description

AnneMarie Luijendijk is the William H. Danforth Professor of Religion and Head of New College West, one of Princeton’s residential colleges. She joined the Princeton faculty in 2006. A scholar of New Testament and Early Christianity and a papyrologist, she is interested in the social history of early Christianity, using both literary texts and documentary sources. Her book Greetings in the Lord: Early Christians and the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (Harvard University Press, 2008) investigates papyrus letters and documents pertaining to Christians in the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus in the pre-Constantinian period. Her second book, Forbidden Oracles? (Mohr Siebeck, 2014), entails a previously unknown 5th or 6th century Coptic manuscript entitled “The Gospel of the Lots of Mary” with Christian oracular answers. She currently works on a book called From Gospels to Garbage, in which she examines the readers and owners of the earliest Christian manuscripts. Since most of the earliest Christian papyri have been found on ancient garbage heaps, she also investigates practices of discarding. Her new research interests involve papyrus acquisitions in the 1920s and Fashion, Footwear, and Faith in Late Antiquity.

Luijendijk specialized in New Testament at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and received her doctorate from Harvard University, The Divinity School, in 2005. From 2013 to 2020 she served as Chair of the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity.