Dr. Christine Mitchell – Scholar of the ancient world

Scholar of the ancient world: the Hebrew Bible, ancient religions, ancient cultures, ancient texts.

Christine Mitchell, PhD

about me

With degrees in Near Eastern Archaeology, Religious Studies, and Comparative Literature, I study and write about how people in the ancient eastern Mediterranean made sense of their world and their place in it. I have written about biblical texts, royal inscriptions of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, interpreting the Bible in contemporary Canada, and the theoretical bases for the study of genre in ancient texts.

A Past-President of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies, inaugural editor of the Advancing Studies in Religion series at McGill-Queen's University Press, and member of a number of editorial boards, I have worked with scholars across a range of disciplines. I continue to support the work of early career researchers and others who are seeking to ask new questions of ancient texts and contexts.

Since July 2022, I am Academic Dean and Professor of Hebrew Bible at Knox College, a constituent member of the Toronto School of Theology and federated with the University of Toronto. From 2002-2021, I was Professor of Hebrew Scriptures at St. Andrew's College, Saskatoon, Canada, where I taught students for various forms of Christian ministry in both academic and practical degree programs. My signature course, "Gender and Power in the Book of Judges," examines the biblical book of Judges with an eye to how gender is constructed and performed, both in the ancient text and in modern interpretations. I am also taking graduate students in the PhD, ThM, and MA programs in the following areas: Persian-Hellenistic biblical texts (e.g. Chronicles, Haggai, Zechariah), Persian-early Hellenistic Judaism, gender in biblical texts, material philology approaches to biblical texts.