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Elaine T. James, the William Henry Green Professor of Old Testament Literature, joined the faculty in 2019. Her work focuses on the literature of the Hebrew Bible, especially its poetry, examining its significance in ancient contexts and its legacies for the contemporary world. Guiding her research are questions about how aesthetic practices shape religious experience. She is particularly interested in ancient concepts related to ecology, art and creativity, and gender. She is the author, most recently, of The Bible and the Arts of Making: Materials, Ecology and Aesthetics in the Hebrew Bible, an examination of how biblical texts theorize human acts of making, craft, and creativity.
James earned her PhD and MDiv from Princeton Theological Seminary. She previously served as associate professor of theology at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Hebrew Bible; Biblical Hebrew Poetry; Literary Criticism and Theory; Aesthetics; Ecology and the Anthropocene; Feminisms; Biblical Theology
The Bible and the Arts of Making: Materials, Ecology, and Aesthetics in the Hebrew Bible (Oxford University Press, 2026)
An Invitation to Biblical Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2021)
Landscapes of the Song of Songs: Poetry and Place (Oxford University Press, 2017)
Reading the Song of Songs in a #MeToo Era, eds., Elaine T. James and Simeon B. Chavel (Boston/Leiden: Brill, 2023)
Biblical Poetry and the Art of Close Reading, eds. J. Blake Couey and Elaine T. James (Cambridge University Press, 2018)
“Giving Birth to Knowledge: Creativity and Procreativity in Biblical Texts,” Biblica 104.2 (2023): 195–217
“The Aesthetics of Biblical Acrostics,” Journal for the Study of Old Testament 46 (2022): 319–38
“‘What Kind of Likeness?’ The Aesthetic Impulse in Biblical Poetry” with Sean Burt, Prooftexts 38 (2020): 1–33
