Virginia Burrus


Virginia Burrus is an American scholar of Late Antiquity and expert on gender, sexuality and religion. She is currently the Bishop W. Earl Ledden Professor of Religion and Director of Graduate Studies at Syracuse University.

Education

Originally from Texas, Burrus attended Yale University where she gained a BA in Classical Civilization in 1981, before studying in Theology at the Georg-August Universität, Germany. She then went on to gain an master's degree in 1984 from the History of Christianity from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA. Her dissertation was entitled Chastity as Autonomy: Women in the Stories of the Apocryphal Acts. She received her PhD in 1991 from the same institution. Her doctoral thesis was entitled The Making of a Heresy: Authority, Gender, and the Priscillianist Controversy. Her PhD was supervised by Rebecca Lyman, Professor Emerita of History at University of California, Berkeley.

Career

Burrus was Professor of Early Church History at Drew University from 1991 to 2013. On joining Syracuse University as the Bishop W. Earl Ledden Professor of Religion, Burrus was the third person to be appointed to the position and succeeded Patricia Cox Miller, Professor Emerita at Syracuse University. Burrus was appointed Director of Graduate Studies at Syracuse University in 2016.
Burrus is a member of several academic societies, including the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature, and has sat on steering committees for both associations. She has been elected as a member of the American Theological Society, the American Society of the Study of Religion and the International Association of Patristic Studies. From 2009-10 she served as the president of the North American Patristics Association, of which she remains a member. Burrus has served as an associate editor for the Journal of Early Christian Studies, and is the founding co-editor of the University of Pennsylvania Press Series Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion.
Professor Burrus specializes in the literary and cultural history of Christianity, and has a wide range of interests including gender, sexuality, orthodoxy and heresy, martyrdom, asceticism, hagiography and histories of theology within Late Antiquity. Burrus engages with a variety of theoretical discourses within her work, including feminism and post-colonialism, applying and critiquing the approaches of 20th century philosophers and theorists such as Baudrillard, Cixous, Foucault and Irigaray. Her 2004 publication The Sex Lives of the Saints has been translated into French, Italian and Czech.

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Books and edited volumes