Mara Foley

Education

B.S. Culture and Politics with Certificate in African Studies - Georgetown University, 2015
M.T.S. New Testament and Early Christianity - Harvard Divinity School, 2021 

Biography

Mara Foley is a doctoral student in Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity. A product of Worcester, Massachusetts and its public schools, she holds a Bachelor of Science in international Culture and Politics from Georgetown University, and a Master of Theological Studies in New Testament and Early Christianity from Harvard Divinity School. She was a Center for Jewish Studies fellow in 2022-2023, and she received the Mary Magdalene Impact fellowship in Summer 2023, which allowed her to conduct fieldwork examining frescoes in the cave churches of Cappadocia, Turkey. She teaches the core theology course “Faith and Critical Reason,” and she is a proud member of the Fordham Graduate Student Workers.

Her current research projects focus on the use of metaphors and images of procreation, pregnancy, and birth to articulate emerging and alternative masculinities in early Christian art and rhetoric, with a particular interest in examples from the Syriac tradition.

She is interested more broadly in feminist historiography, reception history, and religious literacy. She is motivated by a desire to re-think the way we teach history and to make the ancient world and the history of religions legible and accessible to folks of all socioeconomic backgrounds and learning styles.