ABOUT
Martien Halvorson-Taylor is a scholar of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and the literature, religions, and history of ancient Israel. She writes about Second Temple Judaism, literary responses to the Babylonian Exile, biblical novelistic literature, and biblical poetry.
Since 2004, she has taught in Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, where she is an Associate Professor. From 2011–2019, she served as Associate Chair of Religious Studies, the largest such department at a public university in North America. She has held visiting professorships at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology.
She is the winner of the Society of Biblical Literature’s Richards Award for Public Scholarship (2024); a Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship and the foundation’s Richard and Nathalie Jacoff Fellowship in Literature Scholarship (2024); the All University Teaching Award (2016), as well as the award for Mead Honored Faculty (2011–2012), both from UVA.
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 lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with her family and other animals.
ACADEMIC RESEARCH & 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
PUBLIC HUMANITIES
Martien Halvorson-Taylor is the author (and reader) of Writing The Bible (Audible/Great Courses) 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 writes short articles and serves as Hebrew Bible editor for Bible Odyssey, a non-sectarian public education website developed by the Society of Biblical Literature.
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).