Ki-Eun Jang

Ki-Eun Jang is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in Hebrew Bible and Ancient Middle Eastern Studies. With an interest in advancing socially engaged humanities in the study of the Hebrew Bible, her research engages both the social world of the ancient Middle East that produced the Hebrew Bible and our intellectual legacy of modernities that shapes the ways in which we conceived of the past. Her first book project, Contesting Labeled Identities: The Sociology of ‘Gentilics’ in Biblical and Northwest Semitic Literature (Mohr Siebeck, under contract), draws from the history of ideas of race and ethnicity, comparative philology, and literary-historical study of the Hebrew Bible and cognate literature in seeking to answer the question of how modern assumptions about classification and identification collide with ancient assumptions and how the former informs the interpretation of the latter. 

Dr. Jang is currently building two other projects: (1) one focused on historical, legal, religio-political, and literary-poetic constructions of Canaanite identities, discourses, and their legacy from biblical literature to modern reconfigurations, and (2) another that offers a narrative of the “other” nineteenth century by examining the roles of religious, theological, and “scientific” ideas and their liminality in shaping early modern Korean intellectual project as seen from the gaze of the Korean intellectuals, activists, and theologians

Prior to joining the Theology Department at Fordham University in 2022, Dr. Jang was a visiting assistant professor of Hebrew Bible and Near Eastern Studies at Union Theological Seminary in New York (2021-2022) and a postdoctoral lecturer in the Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University (2021).

Her research and teaching have received support from the Catholic Biblical Association of America, the Louisville Institute, the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, the Tantur Ecumenical Institute of the University of Notre Dame, and Pacific, Asian, North American Asian Women in Theology and Ministry (PANAAWTM), among others.

Ph.D., M.Phil., in Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near East Studies, New York University
M.A., Hebrew University of Jerusalem
B.A., Korea University 

Literary history of the Hebrew Bible, law and identities in the Hebrew Bible, scribes and scribal culture in antiquity, postcolonial criticism and biblical studies, migration and diaspora, histories of theories of race and ethnicity, Bible and global Asia, the long nineteenth century, Asian American Studies

“Otherness in the Hebrew Bible,” in Oxford Bibliographies in Biblical Studies. Edited by Christopher Matthews. New York: Oxford University Press (forthcoming).

“Saul’s Israel, the ‘Hebrews,’ and Identity Politics in 1 Samuel 13-14,” Journal of Biblical Literature 142.2 (2023): 589-608.

(Solicited) Review of Reading Biblical Texts Together: Pursuing Minoritized Biblical Criticism. Edited by Tat-siong Benny Liew and Fernando F. Segovia. Catholic Biblical Quarterly 85.4 (2023): 809-12.

“The Circulation of the Storm-God’s Struggle with the Death-God Motif in Ugarit and Babylonia,” Semitica 65 (2023): 5-31.

“‘Nobody’ as an Official Identity: Biblical Gentilics, the Life of ‘FNU,’ and Asian America,” Journal of Asian American Theological Forum 10.2 (2023): 11-15.

Review of Race and Biblical Studies: Antiracism Pedagogy for the Classroom. Edited by Tat-siong Benny Liew and Shelly Matthews. Review of Biblical Literature 09/2023. 

“The ‘Energic’ -n of the Non-Prefix Conjugation in Ugaritic: A New Proposal,” Semitica 64 (2022): 5-20.

“Debates about Migration Have Never been Simple—Just Look at the Hebrew Bible,” The Conversation, 15 September 2022.

Review of The Finger of the Scribe: How Scribes Learned to Write the Bible by William M. Schniedewind. Ancient Jew Review (2022). 

Review of Behind the Scenes of the Old Testament: Cultural, Social, and Historical Contexts. Edited by Jonathan S. Greer, John W. Hilber, and John H. Walton. Catholic Biblical Quarterly 82/1 (2020): 152-55.