Kerry Sonia

Kerry M. Sonia received an A.B. with Honors in Religious Studies from Brown University (2007), an M.T.S. in Hebrew Bible from Harvard Divinity School (2009), and a Ph.D. in Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean from Brown University (2017). She specializes in the Hebrew Bible and Israelite religion, and her work seeks to situate the religious ideologies and practices of the biblical text in their ancient Near Eastern context. Her research interests include the history of biblical interpretation, material culture studies, and theories of gender and ritual. She is particularly interested in reconstructions of Israelite ancestor cult and its relationship to the Jerusalem Temple. Her first book, Caring for the Dead in Ancient Israel (SBL Press, 2020), examines this relationship in light of recent scholarship on family religion and the dynamics of religious competition in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Her current project, which has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Women's Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School, focuses on the social and ritual dimensions of childbirth and miscarriage in the Hebrew Bible and ancient Israel.