Overview
Professor Portier-Young specializes in biblical prophetic literature, early Jewish apocalyptic literature and novellas, and historiographic literature of the late second temple period. Her teaching and research also include practical application of scripture for social justice and preaching. Her current research examines biblical prophecy through the lens of embodiment, including embodied cognition, religious experience, materiality, affect and emotion, and embodied reception. Her work also addresses themes of incarceration, identity, sexuality, gender, and ethnicity, and traditions of violence and nonviolence in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and other early Jewish literature. Her award-winning first book, Apocalypse Against Empire Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism (Eerdmans, 2011), views the first Jewish apocalypses as responses to imperial domination and hegemony. Her second book, The Prophetic Body: Embodiment and Mediation in Biblical Prophetic Literature (Oxford University Press, 2024), establishes the body's centrality to prophetic mediation. She is co-editor with Gregory Sterling of Scripture andSocial Justice: Catholic and Ecumenical Essays (Lexington Press, 2018). Portier-Young has published scholarly articles and essays on monster theory, empire and resistance, violence in biblical literature, apocalyptic literature and imagination, and on the books Daniel, Judges, Esther, Tobit, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, 1 Enoch, Testament of Job, and Joseph and Aseneth, among others. She writes regularly for the website WorkingPreacher.org.