'The Midwifery of God: Tokological Deliverance in Early Jewish and Christian Reconceptions of Genesis 3.16,' International Centre for Biblical Interpretation, University of Gloucester (Feb 2024)
'Mary's Burning Bush: Divine Epiphany Meets Divine Midwifery in the Protevangelium of James,' Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX (Nov 2023)
'Wombful of Grace: Divine and Maternal Embodiment in Early Christian Apocrypha,' New Testament and Patristics Research Seminar, Durham University (May 2023)
'Hierophagic Ritual Technology in Early Christianity,' Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award Colloquium, Internationales Wissenschaftsforum Heidelberg, Universität Heidelberg (Apr 2023)
'The Afterbirth of Genesis 3:16: Early Jewish and Christian Re(con)ceptions of the Maternal Curse,' Biblical Studies Research Seminar, University of Aberdeen (Feb 2023)
'Deliver Her From Evil: Messianic Midwifery in the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch (2 Baruch) 72-74,' Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (Nov 2022)
'Your Faith has Delivered You: Divine Midwifery and Perinatal Discipleship in Early Christian Apocrypha,' Kolloquium Neues Testament, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (June 2022)
'Gendered Fluids of Salvation: The Father's Seminal Lactation and the Virgin's Masculine Maternity in the Odes of Solomon 19,' North American Patristics Society Annual Meeting, Chicago (May 2022)
'Studies in Second Temple Judaism: A Global Enterprise,' Enoch Seminar/Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Michigan (Jan 2022)
'Childbearing, Salvation, and Religious Competition for Women's Devotion in the Latin Acts of Andrew,' Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX (Nov 2021)
'She Will Be Delivered: The Tokological Salvation of Eve in the Greek Life of Adam and Eve and 1 Timothy,' British New Testament Conference, Durham University (Aug 2021)
'Special Delivery: The Birth of Jesus in the Ascension of Isaiah 11,' Primary Text Lab, The Bible and the Religions of the Ancient Near East Collective (June 2021)
Emily supervises dissertations on the New Testament at undergraduate, masters, and doctoral levels, as well as co-teaching a variety of courses: Biblical Greek, Introduction to the New Testament, The Life and Teaching of Jesus, The Theology of Paul, Early Christian Writings, and The Bible in Music, Art, and Literature.
Current Research
Emily J. Gathergood is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Theology, Philosophy, and Religion. Her research focus is on divine and human embodiment in early Jewish and early Christian writings. Her doctoral monograph The Midwifery of God (forthcoming with Oxford University Press) is a winner of the global Manfred Lautenschläger Award for Theological Promise. Her Masters thesis on the material Pauline corpus is published in the journal New Testament Studies. Emily serves on the editorial board of the Journal for the Study of the New Testament and as a reviewer for the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.
In The Midwifery of God, Emily establishes the significance of the underexplored motif of 'tokological' (childbearing-related) deliverance in Second Temple Jewish and early Christian writings. The study offers novel intertextual analysis of a diverse assemblage of canonical and apocryphal receptions of the Genesis myth of Eve's postlapsarian judgement of difficult childbearing. The central thesis is that these sacred texts conceptualise God in feminine terms, as the heavenly Midwife who physiologically delivers parturient women. The traditional aetiological application of Eve's 'curse' to all women is undone through a subversive reading strategy of imagining its divine repeal. The trope of restored Edenic birthing conditions utilises women's bodies as a resource to 'think with' about the eschatological future of humanity and the nature of God, towards a thicker, richer, more affective soteriology. The study invites scholars to reconfigure established accounts of salvation, which skew towards the generic or androcentric, in order to reckon with the motif of divine care of the female body and soul. Critical attention to embodied and engendered ways of theological knowing challenges the dominance of the curse-narrative that continues to shape the ideological construction of women in the contemporary world.