Dakota Hampton

Education 

B.A. - Oral Roberts University, Historical and Philosophical Theology, 2018

M.A.R. - Yale Divinity School, History of Christianity, 2022

Biography

Dakota is a second-year doctoral student in Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity. Raised in a working-class home in Illinois, Dakota transferred from his local community college to complete his undergraduate studies in Historical and Philosophical Theology at Oral Roberts University in 2018. He was awarded the Outstanding Academic Achievement Award in Historical Theology for his senior thesis, which focused on early Christian ritual development during the Quartodeciman Controversy. He completed a Master of Arts in Religion in the History of Christianity from Yale Divinity School in 2022. He is currently a Volunteer Graduate Assistant for the International Digital Dura-Europos Archive and a Fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies at Fordham.

His present research seeks to understand how the earliest forms of the narrative of Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection influenced early Christian eucharistic and paschal practices as mimetic devices within their communal settings and explores the relationship between the early Christian Pascha and the second and post-temple Pesach. He is also interested in the influence of ancient Greco-Roman meal culture on Jewish and Christian worship practices, early Christian material culture, Archaeology, ritual studies, and New Testament reception history.