Lauren Onel is a second-year doctoral student in the Religions of Mediterranean Antiquity subfield.  She is broadly interested in the intersection of social history, material culture, and religious practices of late antique Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism in the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia.  Working with sources in Greek, Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Hebrew, Gəʽəz, and primarily Armenian, recent projects have included examinations of: the Franciscan influence on female monasticism in the Kingdom of Cilicia; Roman literary tropes in Agathangelos’ narrative of the Conversion of Armenia to Christianity;  and the Armenian recension of the work of Ephrem the Syrian.

Lauren graduated from Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio in 2020 with a B.A. in Religious Studies, minors in Classics, Art History, and History, and a concentration in the Program of Humane Studies.  In 2022, she received an M. A. in Religion from the University of Chicago, where she studied Ephrem’s anti-Jewish rhetoric in his “Hymns on the Unleavened Bread.”