Heidi Wendt

Heidi Wendt is Assistant Professor of Religions of the Greco-Roman World, jointly appointed with the School of Religious Studies and the Department of History and Classical Studies. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor in New Testament and Christian Origins at Wright State University (Dayton, OH) and a visiting lecturer at Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT). Heidi completed her PhD in Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean and a Masters in Classics at Brown University in 2013, as well as an MTS in New Testament and Christian Origins at Harvard Divinity School in 2007. She spent 2011–2012 at the American Academy in Rome as a pre-doctoral Rome Prize Fellow in Ancient Studies. Heidi’s research investigates religious developments of the Roman imperial period, with a focus on situating Jewish/Judean and Christian actors and phenomena in their Greco-Roman milieu. She recently published her first monograph, At the Temple Gates: The Religion of Freelance Experts in the Roman Empire (Oxford: 2016), which examines evidence for the rise of self-authorized experts in specialized religious skills, rites, and wisdom under the Roman Empire. Her new book builds on this framework to examine the role of literary production in generating and defending religious authority among rival Christian and other would-be “experts” of the second century.