About

Laura Nasrallah is the Buckingham Professor of New Testament Criticism and Interpretation in Religious Studies and Yale Divinity School. Her research and teaching focus on the intersection of New Testament and early Christian literature with archaeological remains of the Mediterranean world, engaging issues of colonialism, gender, race, status, and power. She has authored several books, including 'Ancient Christians and the Power of Curses: Magic, Aesthetics, and Justice,' which uses contemporary art to analyze ritual objects and practices from the ancient Mediterranean, and 'Archaeology and the Letters of Paul,' which reconstructs the social, economic, and religious contexts of Paul's audience through archaeological methodology. Her work emphasizes understanding early Christian texts within their archaeological and cultural contexts, addressing themes such as justice, piety, and divine images. Nasrallah has also contributed to the study of early Christian responses to Roman art and architecture and has co-edited volumes on race, gender, and ethnicity in early Christian studies. She has conducted online courses on the Letters of Paul and is engaged in projects including a commentary on 1 Corinthians and studies on divination, ritual, and envy in antiquity.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Philosophy
• Art
• History
• Classics
• Anthropology
• Linguistics
• Law
• Psychology
• Aesthetics
• Theology
• Literature
• Engineering

Selected publications

• 1 and 2 Corinthians

  Fortress Press eBooks · 2026-01-28

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Curses in the Pauline Letters

  Fortress Press eBooks · 2025-10-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Justice

  2025-07-23

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract Investigating the topic of justice and the lives of the enslaved in Mediterranean antiquity requires looking not only to legal writing practices, but also to other forms of writing and to writers that treat the (in)justices of enslavement. These include letter-writers, curse inscribers, and novelists. Greek novels, curse tablets, and the letters of Paul each provide glimpses into ancient writing cultures that relied on enslavement and mastery as organizing logics. They also refer to divine involvement both in enslaving and in liberation. This essay looks to critical race theory to provide a heuristic for examining stories about divine justice and legal structures that relied on divine authorization in antiquity.

  PublisherDOI

• Centering Cyprus in Late Antiquity

  Journal of Roman Archaeology · 2025-04-10

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Late Antique Cyprus – autocephalous in relation to the Christian ecclesial systems of organization, with island ports accepting the traffic of continental Mediterranean cities, replete with beautiful mosaics, still echoing with the powerful voice of heresiologist-bishop Epiphanius – deserves even more attention than it has received of late. The two volumes under review attend to the island and inspire future directions for research. The collected papers in Cyprus in the Long Late Antiquity: History and Archaeology between the Sixth and Eighth Centuries (2023), edited by P. Panayides and I. Jacobs, and G. Deligiannakis's A Cultural History of Late Roman Cyprus (2022) come at a moment when academic inquiry into this region and period is actively raising new questions with new data, while also reevaluating points long considered.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Ancient Christians and the Power of Curses

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-06-02 · 30 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Ancient Christians and their non-Christian contemporaries lived in a world of 'magic.' Sometimes, they used curses as ritual objects to seek justice from gods and other beings; sometimes, they argued against them. Curses, and the writings of those who polemicized against curses, reveal the complexity of ancient Mediterranean religions, in which materiality, poetics, song, incantation, and glossolalia were used as technologies of power. Laura Nasrallah's study reframes the field of religion, the study of the Roman imperial period, and the investigation of the New Testament and ancient Christianity. Her approach eschews disciplinary aesthetics that privilege the literature and archaeological remains of elites, and that defines curses as magical materials, separable from religious ritual. Moreover, Nasrallah's imaginative use of art and 'research creations' of contemporary Black painters, sculptors, and poets offer insights for understanding how ancient ritual materials embedded into art work intervene into the present moment and critique injustice.

  PublisherDOI

• Making Justice: Justin Martyr and a Curse From Amathous, Cyprus

  Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum / Journal of Ancient Christianity · 2024-05-30 · 27 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract At the beginning of Justin’s Apology, an account of injustice, Justin calls upon the emperors as ϕύλακες δικαιοσύνης, “guardians of justice.” Justin, 1 Apologia 2,2 (OECT, 80,13 Minns/Parvis). As part of a documentary and legal strategy, Justin’s Apology includes what he claims is an imperial rescript. This paper probes Justin’s Apology and its appended document(s) in relation to other contemporaneous strategies and materializations of seeking justice: appeals and imperial rescripts, on the one hand, and defixiones or “prayers for justice,” on the other. It argues that a cosmology of δαίμονες was activated not only by Justin, who awaits the imminent end of the world, but also by the curses of antiquity. These curses, and Justin’s own libellus or βιβλίδιον, must also be understood as paralegal materials reasonably intended to engage capricious and sometimes violent systems of justice.

  PublisherDOI

• Acknowledgments

  University of California Press eBooks · 2023

  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  DOI

• Aesthetics:

  SBL Press eBooks · 2023-07-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Work of Nails: Religion, Mediterranean Antiquity, and Contemporary Black Art

  Journal of the American Academy of Religion · 2022 · 19 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Aesthetics
  • Art
  • Philosophy

  Abstract This article contributes to the study of religion by investigating the ritual significance of the ancient nail, focusing on its material power in piercing curse tablets (defixiones, sing. defixio) in Mediterranean antiquity. It thus brings a humble object and the gestures and labor associated with it more centrally into the study of religion in antiquity. The article also contributes to the study of religion more broadly by developing a theoretical framework derived from contemporary artistic, material practices. I interpret these ancient ritual objects—the materiality and aesthetics of defixiones and the function of the nail—by engaging contemporary artworks by Valerie Maynard, Renée Stout, and Titus Kaphar. In the racial condition of the United States, these artists materialize theory regarding aesthetics, history, and justice, drawing in part from Kongolese minkisi minkondi, which were nailed and pierced to mark rituals of justice.

  PublisherDOI

• Judgment, Justice, and Destruction: Defixiones and 1 Corinthians

  Journal of Biblical Literature · 2021 · 46 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • History

  The defixiones (curse tablets) at the Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore in Roman Corinth are an underexplored source for ritual life in the city, including the practices of early Christ-followers. Against scholars who are uncomfortable with a Paul who curses, I argue that 1 Corinthians incontrovertibly contains curse formulae. It demonstrates philological parallels between the cursing of a man in 1 Cor 5:1–5 and a double defixio against a woman from Roman Corinth. More importantly, this article shows that ritual curses should be understood as legal formulations that call upon gods and other beings to effect justice. Curses can be attempts at ethical intervention. Contemporary theorizations of race, justice, law, and the definition of the human provide a framework to make sense of legal mechanisms developed outside of dominant forms of "justice."

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Taylor G. Petrey

  26 shared

• AnneMarie Luijendijk

  Gorgias Press (United States)

  26 shared

• Benjamin H. Dunning

  26 shared

• Carly Daniel-Hughes

  Concordia University

  26 shared

• Karen Kings

  Fordham University

  25 shared

• Mohr Siebeck

  Philipps University of Marburg

  25 shared

• Laura Nasrallah Born

  Princeton University

  25 shared

• Sammelband Vereint Wichtige Religionswissenschaftler Der Antike

  Kalamazoo College

  25 shared