Yvonne Sherwood

Guest researcher
Image of Yvonne Sherwood
Email yvonne.sherwood@teologi.uio.no
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Visiting address Blindernveien 9 Domus Theologica 0371 Oslo
Postal address Postboks 1023 Blindern 0315 Oslo

Academic interests

Yvonne Sherwood is currently Visiting Research Professor at the University of Oslo (from which she received an Honorary Doctorate in 2017), while also working as a refugee support worker and researcher at Napier Barracks Drop in, Folkestone, Kent, an experience which is profoundly transforming her work on asylum, ‘aliens’ and the sacred nation. Her research interests include political theology, migration, blasphemy, dynamics of ‘secularisation’, gender and sexuality, and colonial and decolonial Bibles. A pioneer in reception history, she is an editor for the Encyclopaedia of the Bible and Its Reception (De Gruyter). Among her eleven books are Biblical Blaspheming: Trials of the Sacred for a Secular Age (Cambridge; shortlisted for the AAR prize in Textual Criticism), A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives: The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture (Cambridge), The Invention of the Biblical Scholar: A Critical Manifesto (Fortress), The Prostitute and the Prophet (Bloomsbury), The Bible and Feminism: Remapping the Field (Oxford), and Blasphemy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford; translated into German and Danish and available on Audible). She is currently completing five monographs:

  • Where the Gods have Gone: Contemporary Transformations of Religious Vocabularies
  • Grounding Land Claims: From the Canaan Mandate to Law and Real Estate
  • Abraham’s Sacrifice: Breaking and Creating Worlds
  • Resident Aliens: A Political Theology of Nation and Migration
  • Biblicisation without Templates: Ethnography and ‘Encounter’ in the ‘New World’

Background

Yvonne holds degrees in English Literature, Biblical Studies and Jewish Studies from the Universities of Sheffield and Oxford. She was awarded a personal chair in 2010, and has taught at a range of institutions including King’s College London, the University of Glasgow, and the University of Kent. As an ‘evangelistic’ (!) and interdisciplinary scholar, she has enjoyed collaborations with colleagues in departments of Philosophy, Media, Literature and Comparative Literature, History, Anthropology, and Law (as well as Theology and Religious Studies) across the world.

Editorial Appointments

  • Encyclopaedia of the Bible and Its Reception
  • Biblical Interpretation monograph series, Brill
  • Journal for the Study of the Old Testament
  • Journal of Biblical Literature Journal for the Study of the Old Testament
  • The Bible in the Modern World monograph series
  • Library of Hebrew Bible and Old Testament Studies monographs
  • Bible and Critical Theory
  • Postscripts: Sacred Texts and Contemporary Worlds
  • Semeia Studies
  • Semeia

Publications

Books

  • Blasphemy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). Audible https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Blasphemy-Audiobook/B09MG7CC7W
  • Biblical Blaspheming: Trials of the Sacred for a Secular Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)
  • with Stephen D. Moore (co-author) The Invention of the Biblical Scholar: A Critical Manifesto (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 2011)
  • A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives: The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2000)
  • The Prostitute and the Prophet: Hosea’s Marriage in Literary-Theoretical Perspective (JSOTSup 212; Gender, Culture Theory 2; Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), reprinted as The Prostitute and the Prophet: Reading Hosea in the Late Twentieth Century (London: T&T Clark, 2004)

Edited Collections

  • The Bible and Feminism: Remapping the Field (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)
  • with Gary Phillips & Danna Nolan Fewell, Representing the Irreparable: The Shoah, the Bible and the Art of Samuel Bak (Syracuse University Press/Pucker Gallery, 2008)
  • with Darlene Bird, Body and Voice: Gender, Religion, Text (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005)
  • Derrida’s Bible: Reading a Page of Scripture with a Little Help from Derrida (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)
  • with Kevin Hart, Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (New York and London: Routledge, 2004)
  • with Jonneke Bekkenkamp, Sanctified Aggression: Legacies of Biblical and Post-Biblical Vocabularies of Violence (Bible in the Twenty First Century 3; London and New York: Continuum/T&T Clark, 2004)

Articles and Book Chapters

  • ‘Sacrifice and Natality: Surrogacy Structures’, Open Theology 10.1 (2024) (article number 20240022)
  • ‘Space and Regulation in the Song of Songs and Contemporary Sexual Politics’ in Elaine Graham and Simeon Chavel (eds.), Reading the Song of Songs in a #Me Too Era: Women, Sex and Public Discourse (Leiden: Brill, 2023), pp. 223-256.
  • ‘Gesturing Towards Sacrifice’, in Martin M. van Bruinessen, Anne-Marie Korte and Michiel Leezenberg (eds.), Gestures: The Study of Religion as Practice (New York: Fordham University Press, 2022), pp. 47-105
  • ‘Christians, Jews, Muslims and Blasphemy ACH (After Charlie Hebdo) and BSV (Before The Satanic Verses)’ in Yolande Jansen and Nasar Meer (eds.), Critique of Religion: Jews and Muslims in the European Christian Imaginary, Patterns of Prejudice 54 (2020), vols 1-2 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0031322X.2019.1705015
  • ‘Iconographies of Modernity: Figures of Religion, Authority and Gender in the “Secular” State’, in Naomi Goldenberg and Kathleen McPhillips (eds.), The End of Religion: Toward a Feminist Reinvention of the State (London: Routledge, 2020), pp. 198-221
  • ‘The Hypericon of the Golden Calf’ in Birgit Meyer and Terje Stordalen (eds.), Figurations and Sensations of the Unseen in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), pp. 57-76
  • ‘The Impossibility of Queering the Mother: New Sightings of the Virgin Mother in the “Secular” State’, in Sherwood (ed.), The Bible and Feminism: Remapping the Field (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 651-686
  • ‘Migration as Foundation: Hagar the ‘Resident Alien’ as Euro-America’s Surrogate Self’, Biblical Interpretation 26 (2018), pp. 439-468
  • ‘The Impossibility of Theocracy: The Weakness of the Gods’, in David Tabachnik and Toivo Koivukoski (eds.), Challenging Theocracy: Ancient Lessons for Global Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), pp. 217-263
  • ‘Grammars of Sacrifice: Futures, Subjunctives, and what would have/could have happened on Mount Moriah’, Biblical Interpretation 25 (2017), pp. 519-554
  • [reprinted as ‘Grammars of Sacrifice: Futures, Subjunctives, and what would have/could have happened on Mount Moriah’, reprinted in Tat-Siong Benny Liew (ed.), Present and Future of Biblical Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 33-67]
  • ‘The Problem of “Belief”’ in Alan Carling (ed.), The Social Equality of Religion or Belief (Palgrave, Macmillan, 2016), pp. 51-67
  • with Ward Blanton, ‘Bible/Religion/Critique’ in Richard King (ed.) Theory/Religion/Critique (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), pp. 41-56
  •  ‘Modern Trials and Tests of “Experience”’ in Ulrich Schmiedel (ed.) Religious Experience Revisited: Expressing the Inexpressible? (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 30-56
  • On the Freedom of the Concepts of Religion and Belief’ in Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Saba Mahmood, and Peter G. Danchin (eds.), Politics of Religious Freedom (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015), pp. 29-44
  • ‘The Hagaramic and the Abrahamic, or Abraham the non-European’ in Emma Mason (ed.) Reading the Abrahamic Faiths: Rethinking Religion and Literature (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 17-46
  • ‘Early Modern Davids: From Sin to Critique’ in Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith and Rachel Judith Willie (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c. 1530-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 640-658
  • ‘Kanu and the Book’ in Melissa C. Stewart (ed.), Simulating Aichele: Essays in Bible, Film, Culture and Theory (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2015), pp. 5-26
  • ‘Prophetic “Postcolonialism”: Performing the Disaster of the Spanish Conquest on the Stage of Jeremiah’, in Christl M. Maier (ed.), IOSOT Congress Volume Munich, 2013 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 300-332
  • ‘Hagar and Ishmael: The Reception of Expulsion’, Interpretation 68 (2014), pp. 286-304
  • ‘Cutting up “Life”: Sacrifice as a Device for Clarifying—and Tormenting—Fundamental Distinctions Between Human, Animal and Divine’ in Jennifer L. Koosed (ed.) Posthumanism (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 2014) pp. 247-300
  • ‘Spectres of Abraham, Shadows of Paul’, in Agata Bielik-Robson and Adam Lipszyc (eds.) Judaism in Contemporary Thought: Traces and Influences (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 26-38
  • The Religart Group, postgraduate writing collective led by Sherwood, ‘Sharmanka: Art, Religion and Identity in the Kinetic Sculptures of Eduard Bersudsky and Tatiana Jakovskaya’, in A.K.M. Adam and S. Tongue (eds.) Looking Through a Glass Bible (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 210-234
  • ‘Francisco de Vitoria’s More Excellent Way: How the Bible of Empire Discovered the Tricks of [the Argument from] Trade’, Biblical Interpretation 21.2 (2013), pp. 215-275
  • ‘Beyond the Conflict Between “Reason” and “Revelation”: How Grotius uses Biblical and Traditional Resources to Loosen the Hold of the Letter of the Text’, in Hans Bløm (ed.), Grotiana 2014, 1, (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 95-118
  • ‘Occidental Apocalypse’ in Veronika Wieser (ed.) Abendländische Apokalyptik: Kompendium zur Genealogie des Untergangs/Occidental Apocalypticism: Compendium on the Genealogy of the End (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2012), pp. 39-74
  • ‘Biblicisation without Templates, or Accidents of the Biblical in Sixteenth Century Mesoamerica’ in Carly Crouch and Jonathan Stökl (eds.), In the Name of God: The Bible in the Colonial Discourse of Empire (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 4-62
  • ‘Reflections on “Modern” Biblical Studies, or Why Philip Davies is (Just a Little Bit) Like Immanuel Kant’, in Duncan Burns and John W. Rogerson (eds.), Far from Minimal: Celebrating the Work of Philip R. Davies (Whose Festschrift is it Anyway?) (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2012), pp. 245-287
  • ‘The Place of Religion in the Iconography of Democracy and the Politics/Aesthetics of “Representation” (Race/Religion/Sex)’, The Bible and Critical Theory 7.2. (2011)
  • with Mark Brummitt, ‘The Fear of Loss inherent in Writing: Jeremiah 36 as the Tedious Self-Narration of a Highly Self-Conscious Scroll’, in Louis Stulman and A.R. Pete Diamond (eds.), Jeremiah (Dis)placed: New Directions in Writing/Reading Jeremiah (London: T&T Clark 2010), pp. 47-67
  • with Stephen D. Moore, ‘Biblical Studies “After” Theory: Onwards Towards the Past. Part One: After “After Theory” and Other Apocalyptic Conceits’, Biblical Interpretation 18.1 (2010), pp. 1-27
  • with Stephen D. Moore, ‘Biblical Studies “After” Theory: Onwards Towards the Past. Part Two: The Secret Vices of the Biblical God’, Biblical Interpretation 18.2 (2010) Biblical Interpretation 18:2 (2010) pp. 87-113
  • with Stephen D. Moore, ‘Biblical Studies “After” Theory: Onwards Towards the Past. Part Three: Theory in the First and Second Waves’, Biblical Interpretation 18: 3 (2010) pp. 191-225
  • ‘Scenes of Textual Repentance and Critique/Confession: King David between the Renaissance and the Reformation, the “Secular” and the “Sacred” and Samuel and Psalms’, in Timothy Beal, Claudia V. Camp and Tod Linafelt (eds.), The Fate of King David: The Past and Present of a Biblical Icon (London: T&T Clark, 2010), pp. 32-60
  • ‘On the Genesis of the Alliance between the Bible and Rights’, in Matthew Coomber (ed.), The Bible and Justice: Ancient Texts, Modern Challenges (London: Equinox, 2010), pp. 1-28
  • [‘Luderen, der blev vaek—fortolkernes problemer med Hoseas’ Bog’, Bibliana 1 (2010), trans. Allan Rosengren, based on ch. 1 of The Prostitute and the Prophet]
  • with Lesley Orr, ‘Love in/of the Bible: Returning (to) Divine Love in the Book of Hosea’, in R.S. Sugirtharajah (ed.), Caught Reading Again: Scholars and Their Books (London: SCM Press, 2009), pp. 187-204
  • ‘The Baroque Prophets: An Encounter between the Hebrew Prophets and John Donne’, in Roberta Sterman Sabbath (ed.), Sacred Tropes: Tanakh, New Testament and Qur’an as Literature and Culture (Leiden: Brill 2009), pp. 115-42
  •  ‘“Tongue-Lashing” or a Prophetic Aesthetics of Violation: An Analysis of Prophetic Structures that Echo Beyond the Biblical World’ in Julia M. O’Brien and Chris Franke (eds.), Aesthetics of Violence in the Prophets (London: T&T Clark, 2009), pp. 27-50
  • ‘Abraham in London, Marburg/Istanbul and Israel: Between Theocracy and Democracy, Ancient Text and Modern State’, Biblical Interpretation 16 (2008), pp. 105-53
  • ‘The God of Abraham and Exceptional States: The Early Modern Rise of the Whig/Liberal Bible, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 76.2 (2008), pp. 312-43
  • ‘Iconoclash and Akedah: Holocaust and Sacrifice in the Art of Samuel Bak’, in Phillips, Fewell and Sherwood (eds.), Representing the Irreparable (2008), pp. 125-50
  • ‘Bush’s Bible as a Liberal Bible (Strange Though That Might Seem)’, Postscripts 2.1 (2006), pp. 47-58
  • ‘Passion. Binding. Passion’, in Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller (eds.), Theologies of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline (New York: Fordham University Press: 2006), pp. 169-93
  • ‘When Johannes de Silentio sounds like Johanna de Silentio: Strange Harmonies and Discords in the “Attunement” Section of Fear and Trembling’, in Darlene Bird and Yvonne Sherwood (eds.), Gender, Religion, Text: Body and Voice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 3-13
  • ‘Prophetic Literature’, in David Jasper, Elizabeth Jay and Andrew Hass (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 289-306
  • ‘Binding-Unbinding: Divided Responses of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to the “Sacrifice” of Abraham’s Beloved Son’, Journal for the American Academy of Religion 72.4 (2004), pp. 821-61 (top ten downloads from JAAR website 2006)
  • ‘Derrida’s Bible’, in Sherwood (ed.), Derrida’s Bible (2004) pp. 1-20
  • ‘And Sarah Died’, in Sherwood (ed.) Derrida’s Bible (2004), pp. 261-92
  • with John D. Caputo, ‘Otobiographies, or How a Torn and Disembodied Ear Hears a Promise of Death [A Pre-arranged Meeting between Yvonne Sherwood and John D. Caputo and the Book of Amos and Jacques Derrida]’, in Sherwood and Hart (eds.), Derrida and Religion (2004), pp. 209-39
  • ‘Other Testaments’, in Sherwood and Hart (eds.), Derrida and Religion (2004), pp. 3-26
  • with John D. Caputo and Kevin Hart and Jacques Derrida ‘Epoché and Faith: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’ in Sherwood and Hart (eds.), Derrida and Religion (2004), pp. 27-52
  • ‘Textual Carcasses and Isaac’s Scar, or What Jewish Interpretation Makes of the Violence that Almost Takes Place on Mount Moriah’, in Bekkenkamp and Sherwood (eds.) Sanctified Aggression (2004), pp. 22-43
  • ‘The Thin Blade of Difference Between Real Swords and Words about “Sharp-Edged Iron Things”: Reflections on How People Use the Word’, in Bekkenkamp and Sherwood (eds.), Sanctified Aggression (2004), pp. 1-9
  • ‘Isaac to Abraham’, in Philip R. Davies (ed.), Yours Faithfully: Virtual Letters from the Bible (London: Equinox, 2004), pp. 5-23
  • with Philip R. Davies and Alastair Hunter, ‘Letter to Bible Authors [draft]’, in Davies (ed.), Yours Faithfully (2004),  pp. 153-158
  • ‘Jonah the Jew: The Evolution of a Biblical Character’, in Tony Kushner and Nadia Valman (eds.), Philosemitism, Antisemitism and the ‘Jews’: Perspectives from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 3-27
  • ‘“Darke Texts Needs Notes”: Prophetic Poetry, John Donne and the Baroque’, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 27.1 (2002), pp. 47-74
  • ‘“Not with a Bang But a Whimper”: Shrunken Apocalypses of the Twentieth Century and the Book of Qoheleth’, in Christopher Rowland and John Barton (eds.), Apocalyptic in History and Tradition (JSPSup 43; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), pp. 94-116
  • with Mark Brummitt, ‘The Tenacity of the Word: Jeremiah 36 and the Attempt to Construct an Appropriate Edifice to the Memory of Robert Carroll’, in Alastair Hunter and Philip R. Davies (eds.), Sense and Sensitivity: A Tribute to Robert Carroll (Sheffield: Continuum, 2002), pp. 3-29
  • ‘Of Fruit and Corpses and Wordplay Visions: Picturing Amos 8.1-3’, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 92 (2001), pp. 5-27
  • ‘Feminist Scholarship’, in John Rogerson (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 296-315
  •  ‘Prophecy and the Art of Sensation’, in Stephen D. Moore (ed.), In Search of the Present: The Bible through Cultural Studies (Semeia 82; Atlanta: Scholar’s Press, 2000), pp. 183-224
  • ‘“Colonising the Old Testament” or “Representing Christian Interests Abroad”: Jewish–Christian Relations Across Old Testament Territory’, in S.E Porter and B.W.R. Pearson (eds.), Christian–Jewish Relations Through the Centuries (Roehampton Institute London Papers; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), pp. 255-81
  • ‘Derrida’, in A.K.M Adams and Jon Berquist (eds.), A Postmodern Handbook to the Bible (St Louis: Chalice, 2000), pp. 69-75
  • ‘Cross-Currents in the Book of Jonah: Some Jewish and Cultural Midrashim on a Traditional Text’, Biblical Interpretation 6.1 (1998), pp. 48-79
  • ‘Rocking the Boat: Jonah and the New Historicism’, Biblical Interpretation 5.4 (1997), pp. 364-402
  • ‘“White Mythology” or “Metaphor in the Text of Theology”: Jacques Derrida Among the Prophets of the Hebrew Bible’, Imprimatur: A Journal of Criticism and Theory 1 (1996), pp. 83-89
  • ‘Boxing Gomer: Controlling the Deviant Woman in Hosea 1–3’, in Athalya Brenner (ed.), A Feminist Companion to the Prophets (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), pp. 101-25
Published June 30, 2025 3:26 PM - Last modified Aug. 5, 2025 3:31 PM