Homrighausen Graduates

Dr. Joanna Homrighausen, one of Duke Graduate Program in Religion’s newest alumni, had her degree conferred Mother’s Day weekend 2024 after having successfully defended her dissertation “Writing Esther, Then and Now: The Materiality of the Megillah in Ritual, Memory, and Biblical Interpretation” several weeks ago. Her project, in the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament track, was co-advised by Laura Lieber and Ellen Davis, with Marc Brettler, David Morgan, and Marc Michael Epstein (Vassar College) serving on her committee.

Joanna (formerly Jonathan) came to us after receiving a Master of Arts in Biblical Studies from Graduate Theological Union in 2018. In September 2020, mere months after finishing coursework, she and her husband Michael left Durham for the eccentric Williamsburg, VA, where Michael took up a position as Digital Archivist in the Special Collections Research Center in the library of the College of William & Mary. Lonely and isolated in their new town, the two did the normal COVID things: starting an herb and vegetable garden, adopting dogs #2 and #3, converting to Judaism, and interrogating gender identity.

Out of an oppositional desire to disprove her professors’ concerns about skipping school, she completed her comprehensive exams, language exams, proposal defense, and 521-page dissertation entirely remotely. Out of sheer lockdown boredom, she wrote a book on religion and art—Planting Letters and Weaving Lines: Calligraphy, The Song of Songs, and The Saint John’s Bible (Liturgical Press, 2022)—and curated Visual Music: Calligraphy & Sacred Texts, an online exhibition for the Luce Center for the Arts and Religion at Wesley Theological Seminary. She also beat Dark Beast Ganon in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

During her time at Duke, Homrighausen was awarded the Perilman Fellowship in Jewish Studies from the Duke Center for Jewish Studies in 2022, the Shatzmiller Fellowship from North Carolina Jewish Studies Seminar in 2021, and the Archival Expeditions Fellowship from Rubenstein Library at Duke University in 2019.

Since 2021, Joanna has been Adjunct Lecturer of Judaic Studies and Religious Studies at the College of William & Mary, where she has solo-taught ten classes. She will stay put for the foreseeable future. We wish her well.