Caryn Reeder Named Fulbright Scholar

Caryn Reeder, Westmont associate professor of religious studies, has earned a prestigious Fulbright award for teaching and research in the West Bank of the Palestinian Territories. The J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board award supports Reeder’s year-long sabbatical in the West Bank, where she will be teaching at a Palestinian university and conducting her own research from September 2013 through June 2014 Reeder’s research will examine “women, children and war in biblical and classical antiquity” and consider the “realities and rhetoric of violence,” both in ancient texts and the modern world.

Reeder lived in Jerusalem before and during the Al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000, witnessing some of the effects of the conflict. She worked for the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students in Israel from 1999-2001, teaching a semester at Bethlehem Bible College.

“Including the voices of Palestinian and Israeli students, faculty, and members of the community will deepen my research into the realities and rhetoric of violence,” she says. “My own research and teaching will provide students the chance to explore the roots of violence in Judeo-Christian traditions, giving them a new perspective for understanding ancient texts and contemporary experiences. Finally, I will be able to bring what I learn home, helping my students at Westmont understand the global significance of what they are privileged to study in a very peaceful place.”

Reeder, a graduate of Augustana College, earned master’s degrees at both Wheaton College and the University of Cambridge. She earned a doctorate in New Testament at Cambridge and began teaching at Westmont in 2007.

She has authored a book “The Enemy in the Household: Family Violence in Deuteronomy and Beyond,” and several journal articles and book chapters, including “Vindicating Womankind: Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” to the book “Breaking Boundaries: Female Biblical Interpreters Who Challenged the Status Quo.”