Natalie Reynoso

Education 

BA, Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts, 2015 
MTS, Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2017 

Biography 

Natalie Reynoso is a Ph.D. student in History of Christianity at Fordham University. Her research examines connections between body, identity, and death in early Christian thought and practice, and seeks to understand representations of death as an embodied transition in late ancient Christian texts. Her current work centers on martyrs in the Sassanian empire, with a particular focus on Zoroastrian converts to Christianity in Syriac sources, read in conversation with Greek, Latin, and Coptic martyrdoms. In this interrogation, Natalie uses critical theory—particularly queer and gender theory—to reconfigure the relationship between two related conceptual constellations: body, identity, and selfhood on the one hand, and sex, gender, and sexuality on the other. She is also interested in Afro-pessimist thought, the temporal dimension of incarceration, and the history of animals in antiquity. 
Natalie teaches the Theology Department’s freshman core course, “Faith and Critical Reason,” and has served as a teaching assistant for courses on the New Testament and the history of time. Together with Matthew Charles, she co-authored a forthcoming article about pedagogy titled  “Teaching in the Wake,” about the urgent need to combat (and address complicity with) systemic  racism in the academy. This piece highlights the necessity to center displaced and marginalized  voices as primary and prioritized conversation partners in the classroom. 
Natalie holds an MTS from Harvard Divinity School, with a concentration in Women, Gender, Sexuality, and Religion. She serves on the Society of Biblical Literature’s Student Advisory Board as an On-Campus Student Representative Coordinator, and is an organizer of Fordham Theology Department’s Students of Color Caucus. She also holds a GSAS Distinguished Fellowship from Fordham University and is a Fellow at Fordham’s Center for Jewish Studies. Additionally, she was the recipient of a Forum for Theological Exploration Doctoral Fellowship, and was awarded the Nijmeh Kiraz Graduate Student Paper Prize at the Eighth North American Syriac Symposium.