Ingrid E Lilly

I am an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Wofford College. I earned my Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible with distinction from Emory University. My previous position was Assistant Professor of Jewish and Religious Studies at Western Kentucky University (WKU) in the undergraduate and Masters programs for four years, and I have taught PhD students at the Graduate Theological Union (GTU), MDiv students at San Francisco Theological Seminary (SFTS), and undergraduates in the Middle East Studies Department at Georgia State. I was recently invited to teach an undergraduate and a PhD course in the Near Eastern Studies department at U. C. Berkeley, which I had to decline because of the logistics of maternity leave.

My current research focuses on a philology of medicine, illness, and embodiment. I still embrace a mostly historical-critical framework on the textualization of bodies in the Hebrew Bible, cognate literature, and Jewish and Christian reception. I draw primarily on medical anthropology, Mesopotamian medicine, cultural anthropology, gender studies, ANE/Greco-Roman comparative studies, and Hebrew philology. I am editing and contributing to a peer-reviewed volume of HBAI called “The Philology of Gender,” have published two essays on spirit and illness (Brill and Mohr Siebeck) and two essays on gender in the Women's Bible Commentary and the festschrift for Carol Newsom, and have an essay on prophecy and spirit possession under review at Harvard Theological Review. I am frequently invited to give lectures on my work. In 2019, I will be speaking about possession illness for an Oxford Seminar on Medical Anthropology, and will deliver a similarly themed keynote talk at University of Wisconsin, Madison. I have been invited to give public lectures at San Francisco Theological Seminary, Fuller Theological Seminary, Complutense University of Madrid, the Carlos Museum at Emory, the Pacific School of Religion, and I was invited to deliver lectures on “Gender and Religions” to students of human rights law at L’Institut International des Droits de l’Homme in Strasbourg, France.

My second book, Winds in the Body: A Critical Medical Anthropology of Spirit in the Ancient Near East, Hebrew Bible, and Second Temple Jewish Literature, was accepted as a proposal at Cambridge University Press and presents a cultural survey of spirit. Beginning with cases of Western ideas about spirit, and specifically rejecting the embodied poetics of Gunkel and the charisma of Weber, I adopt concepts of the body from medical anthropology to examine spirit/wind as a feature of embodiment. Filling an undertheorized gap, I newly examine ancient Near Eastern medical, lament, hymnic and related literature with some comparative insights from the three great ancient medical traditions (Greek, Indian, and Chinese). The medical crux of body, myth, and metaphor informs my discussion of wind-based cultural syndromes and spirit possession illness, concepts which allow a new reading of biblical and Second Temple literature about spirit/wind in light of health systems, purity systems, and the gendered politics of suffering bodies. Early preparations for this book include several published essays and presentations at Society for the Anthropology of Religion conference, the Bay Area Bible Scholars Workshop, and the Muilenburg-Koenig workshop at San Francisco Theological Seminary. Methodologically, I draw on coursework and teaching in Emory and Yale’s Anthropology departments, comparative courses I developed at WKU, and over a decade of reading scholarship on cultural anthropology and the body.

My first book represents my strong grounding in Hebrew and Greek philology and textual criticism. Two Books of Ezekiel (VTSup 150; Brill, 2012) explored text-critical, editorial, and materialist approaches to fluid textuality. The book grew out of a dissertation written under Brent A. Strawn (chair), Carol A. Newsom, David L. Petersen, and my outside reader Eugene C. Ulrich of the University of Notre Dame, and for which I received the honor of distinction. The success of my book led to several publishing, conference, and leadership invitations. Most notably, I am the editor of Ezekiel for Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition an eclectic, critical text to be published by SBL, and have been invited to write Ezekiel for the new Oxford Biblical Commentary Series, which includes a new critical translation. My book is the first full-length study of the earliest manuscript of Ezekiel, a Greek codex, and proposes new understandings of Ezekiel’s textual history and the socio-literary life of its composition and early reception as a Christian codex.