Nina E. Livesey (Ph.D. SMU, Dallas, Texas) is professor emerita of religious studies at the OU College of Professional and Continuing Studies. Trained in biblical studies with a specialization in Pauline letters, Nina’s interest can be broadly characterized as the investigation into various aspects of Christian emergence. Her first monograph, Circumcision as a Malleable Symbol (Mohr Siebeck, 2010), explores interpretations of the Hebrew rite of circumcision across diverse ancient texts and challenges a common assumption of a unitary signification of this Judean practice. Her second monograph, Galatians, and the Rhetoric of Crisis: Demosthenes, Cicero, and Paul (Polebridge Press, 2016), is a comparative study of the rhetoric of urgency, encomium, emotive language, and disjuncture across the Philippic speeches of Demosthenes and Cicero and Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. Against traditional scholarship, the book provides evidence of a wide use of rhetoric in Galatians. Her current work involves an analysis of Pauline letters more generally, including their status.
Nina began teaching for PACS in 2006 with The Bible as Literature course, which she continues to teach.
She is a longtime scholar member of Westar Institute, a former co-editor of Forum, and, with Jason BeDuhn and Lillian Larsen, co-chairs Westar’s Christianity Seminar Phase II.
Email Nina - nlivesey@ou.edu
