About

ABOUT

Martien Halvorson-Taylor is a scholar of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and the literature, religions, and history of ancient Israel.

Since 2004, she has taught at the University of Virginia, where she is an Associate Professor. She has held visiting professorships at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, where she also developed a joint global humanities program with the University of Virginia. From 2011–2019, She served as Associate Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, the largest such department at a public university in North America. 

She was born and raised in New York City. She received her B.A. from Yale University (English Literature & Language), M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School, and Ph.D. from Harvard University (Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations). She currently live in Charlottesville, Virginia with her family and other animals.

Public Humanities

She has recently published a short course with Audible, called Writing The Bible, which explores the question, “Who wrote the Bible?” For more information about Writing The Bible, please see here for the course and here for a description and supporting materials.

She also write short articles and serves as Hebrew Bible editor for Bible Odyssey, a non-sectarian public education website developed by the Society of Biblical Literature. 

Research Labs

From 2018–2024 she co-directed the Religion, Race & Democracy Lab, a humanities lab at the University of Virginia. She continues to co-host its signature podcast, Sacred & Profane, available at this website, on iTunes, and a number of other platforms. Sacred & Profane was funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities Media Projects Production Grant (2022–2024).Through the Lab, she was the recipient of a National Endowment for Humanities grant to direct “Revisiting Religion and Place,” a three-week, Level II residential Summer Institute for faculty in higher education (June 2023).

Academic Writing

Her academic writing has focused on the Babylonian Exile and the concepts of “exile,” “forced migration,” and “diaspora” in the Bible and early Judaism. Her first book, Enduring Exile, charts the transformation of exile from an historically-bound and geographically-constrained concept into a symbol for physical, political, and spiritual distress. She is currently co-editing, with Mark Hamilton, the Oxford Handbook on Biblical Exile (forthcoming 2025). 

More recently, she has been researching and writing on biblical poetry and how it says what cannot otherwise be said. Her primary project is a commentary on the Song of Songs—an extended erotic love poem in the Hebrew Bible. Her next project will focus on the biblical book of Job (much of which is in poetry) and its interpretation. 

For academic writing, see here.

CV is available here.

email is maht at virginia (dot) edu