Bernadette J. Brooten, director of the Feminist Sexual Ethics Project, is Robert and Myra Kraft and Jacob Hiatt Professor of Christian Studies and Professor of Women's Studies at Brandeis University and a former MacArthur Fellow. She has also held fellowships from the Harvard Law School, the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and many other granting agencies.
Brooten is currently writing a book on early Christian women who were enslaved or who were slave-holding, and she is editing a volume on slavery's long shadow over the lives of girls and women that will focus on the intersection of slavery, religion, women, and sexuality.
She has written Women Leaders in The Ancient Synagogue: Inscriptional Evidence and Background Issues (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982) and Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), for which she received three awards. In addition, she has published articles on Paul and the Jewish Law, Jewish epigraphy, papyrological and literary evidence for Jewish women's power to initiate divorce in antiquity, and on various topics of ancient Jewish and early Christian women's history.
Professor Brooten's interdisciplinary scholarship in Women' Studies and Near Eastern and Judaic Studies is representative of the polymath nature of the Brandeis faculty.
Consider also, for example, Jeffrey Hall, Professor of Biology and Volen National Center for Complex Systems, who is not only a renowned researcher in the neurogentics of the fruitfly, but a noted Civil War scholar, as well.