Nyasha Junior, Ph.D.

Nyasha Junior is an associate professor in the Department of Religion and an affiliate faculty member in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies program at Temple University in Philadelphia. Prior to coming to Temple, she taught at Howard University’s School of Divinity and the University of Dayton’s Department of Religious Studies. Junior is a biblical scholar and earned a Ph.D. in Old Testament from Princeton Theological Seminary. Also, she holds an M.Div from Pacific School of Religion, an M.P.A. from Princeton University, and a B.S.F.S. from Georgetown University. She has taught and published on religion, race, gender, and their intersections for over 12 years. For the 2020-21 academic year, she is a visiting associate professor of Women’s Studies and African-American Religions at Harvard Divinity School. Her current research is on 19th-century Black woman evangelist Jarena Lee.

Junior is the author of An Introduction to Womanist Biblical Interpretation (Westminster John Knox Press, 2015). It provides the first book on the history and development of womanist approaches within biblical scholarship. Her second book Reimagining Hagar: Blackness and Bible (Oxford University Press, 2019) offers a reception history of biblical Hagar. It details how and why some reading communities interpret Hagar as a Black woman. Co-authored with Jeremy Schipper, Junior’s third book Black Samson: The Untold Story of an American Icon (Oxford University Press, 2020) analyzes how invoking the biblical character of Samson became a unique and powerful way for Black American intellectuals, activists, and artists to voice strategies and opinions about race and racial inequalities in America. Junior is a frequent guest speaker at colleges and universities. Her public scholarship has appeared in Religion & Politics, DAME Magazine, Bitch Media, and other media outlets, and she is a regular contributor at Women in Higher Education.