2019 has already been an eventful year for The Shiloh Project. Here’s an update of our activities so far:
Visiting Scholars
We are hosting three visiting scholars in 2019.
Project Shiloh member Emily Colgan (Trinity Methodist College, Auckland) will be visiting SIIBS in September during her sabbatical and will give a paper about her research on Christian women’s self-help books, focusing on the best-selling book Captivating.
Project Shiloh co-lead Caroline Blyth (University of Auckland, New Zealand) is spending time as a visiting scholar at the University of Leeds from February to May, 2019. She is also visiting Lund University during her time in the northern hemisphere where she will be talking to staff and students about research, activism, and Project Shiloh.
Project Shiloh member Mmapula Kebaneilwe is visiting from the University of Botswana, and will spend time at the Universities of Leeds and Sheffield. She is a project partner on the Shiloh Project AHRC Networking grant.
New Members
We are delighted to welcome Dr Rocio Figueroa Alvear (Good Shepherd College, Auckland) as one of our newest member of Project Shiloh. You can read about Rocio’s research into church sexual abuse here.
Also joining us is Professor David Tombs, Howard Paterson Chair of Theology and Public Issues, at the University of Otago, Aotearoa New Zealand. You can read more about David’s work here, here, and here.
Papers and presentations
Johanna Stiebert will be presenting a paper at the Biblical Studies staff-PG seminar at Edinburgh University on 22 March. The title of her talk will be ‘Religious Violence and Rape Culture: Reflections on the Woman Accused of Adultery in Numbers 5’. Back in November, 2018, she also presented a paper at Durham University, titled ‘False Allegation of Rape: Genesis 39 and the Present’.
Mmapula Kebaneilwe will be presenting at a SIIBS seminar on 1 April. Her paper is titled, ‘Troubling Misogyny and Gender-Based Violence: Examples from Botswana and the Hebrew Bible’.
A number of Shiloh Project members will be presenting papers at a conference to be held at the University of Glasgow (29 March), ‘Women and Gender in the Bible and the Ancient World’. Shiloh co-lead, Dr Katie Edwards will be presenting the keynote lecture at this conference, titled ‘Rape Myths and Gospel Truths: The Bible and Sexual Violence’. Katie also recently presented a seminar at the University of Leeds on 14 February, titled ‘Bad Romance? Representations of David and Bathsheba in Popular Culture and the Erasure of Sexual Violence’.
Living Library
The Living Library project took place at the University of Bradford in January 2019. Project co-leads Katie Edwards and Johanna Stiebert took part in this project, which considered gender based violence in all its forms.
Shiloh Project Practitioner Workshop
On 25 March, the Shiloh Project will host an invitation-only event, bringing together academics and practitioners working on responses to sexual violence. The aims of this workshop will be to foster effective collaborations between academics and community practitioners, thinking about how we can work together in the pursuit of challenging rape culture and gender-based violence, as well as supporting victims of this violence.
Story House Women Chester
Katie Edwards will be participating in a public event titled, Contemporary Rape Cultures and Religion: Making Sense of a Complex Relationship, on April 27, 2019. She will be discussing this topic with Dawn Llewellyn (Chester University).
#SheToo podcast
Three Project Shiloh members have been involved in a recent podcast series, #SheToo, produced by Rosie Dawson for the Bible Society. Dr Katie Edwards spoke about Hagar (Genesis 16), Professor Johanna Stiebert discussed Tamar (2 Samuel 13), and Dr Meredith Warren looked at the book of Revelation.
Routledge Focus Book Series
Project directors of Shiloh have been invited to develop a new series for Routledge Focus. The series, titled Rape Culture and the Bible, will run for five years and will include short (25,000-50,000 word) monographs considering the topic of rape culture and and the Bible from different hermeneutical and contextual perspectives.
Grants and Funding Successes
Project co-directors of Shiloh have been involved in a training programme run by Fearless Futures, an organization that engages people in critical thinking to understand and challenge root causes of inequalities in order to grow powerful new ways of leading and designing transformative change. The co-directors will soon be working directly in schools to explore attitudes relating to religious imagery in popular culture.
- AHRC Networking
Katie and Johanna are returning to Botswana in July to participate in the gathering of the 5th meeting of the Circle for Concerned African Women Theologians.
- WUN
We have brought the WUN project with the University of Ghana to a successful conclusion and are now applying for follow-on funding with the GCRF.
- AHRC Standard Grant
We are delighted to announce Project Shiloh’s success in securing a grant with the AHRC to explore sexual and gender based violence in the Bible and its afterlives in contemporary popular culture. This grant will allow Project Shiloh members to organize events at the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield, and Auckland, including seminars, workshops, art exhibitions, podcasts, and performances. The project lead is Katie Edwards, and Johanna Stiebert and Caroline Blyth are co-investigators. The team is also joined by Dr Richard Newton from the University of Alabama. The project will also allow this project team to present papers at two key conferences in 2020 – the SBL meeting in Boston and the International Association for the History of Religions conference in Dunedin.
Call for contributors
If you are interested in getting involved in Project Shiloh, either as a member or a contributor to our blog, please contact us at [email protected].
