Reyhan Durmaz

Assistant Professor of Religious Studies

Cohen Hall 230

Reyhan Durmaz's research interests include Syriac Christianity, religion and society in late antiquity, hagiography, and Christian-Muslim relations in the Middle Ages. Her first monograph, Stories between Christianity and Islam: Saints, Memory, and Cultural Exchange in Late Antiquity and Beyond (University of California Press, October 2022), examines the transmission of non-biblical saints' stories and cults from Christianity to Islam. Her other research projects include study of rural Christianities in the Middle Ages in the eastern Mediterranean, and religious skepticism in the medieval Middle East. Dr. Durmaz received her PhD from Brown University (2019), with a Joukowsky Outstanding Dissertation Award in Humanities. She was a Junior Fellow in Byzantine Studies at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection (AY 2018-19). Her research has also been supported by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.

During her time as a Faculty Fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center's Forum on Migration (AY 2021-22), Dr. Durmaz started working on the first Arabic newspaper published in the United States, Kawkab America, analyzing the ways the Syrian immigrant community articulated religion and religious diversity in 19th-century NYC. She has also recently organized a Boardman online talk series, Destabilizing Religion in the Medieval Middle East (February-March 2022), which examined the categories of religion and non-religion in the context of the medieval Middle East.

She is affiliated with the Ancient History Graduate Group, Global Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and the Middle East Center at Penn, and a member of the American Academy of Religion, Society of Biblical Literature, North American Patristics Society, Byzantine Studies Association of North America, and the Middle East Studies Association. She also serves as the co-chair of the Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins, and as a member of the Advisory Board of the Wolf Humanities Center.

Dr. Durmaz is the Faculty Research Fellow at Fordham University's Orthodox Christian Studies Center for the AY 2022-23. With this fellowship, she researches forms and expressions of Christianity in the medieval Middle Eastern countryside. In connection to this project, she is building a digital photograph archive of medieval churches and monasteries – Visualizing Countryside, which received the Delaware Valley Digital Project Prize.

You can learn more about Dr. Durmaz's book and recent research projects in her interview in the Women Scholars of Orthodox Christianity series.

Office Hours

Thursday 10am-12pm, Cohen Hall 230

Education

Ph.D., Brown University (2019)
M.A., Central European University (2012)
M.A., Koc University (2010)
B.A., Middle East Technical University (2007)

Research Interests

Syriac Studies

Medieval Studies

Byzantine Studies

Global Christianity

Christian-Muslim Relations

Research Areas

Christianity
Ancient Mediterranean Religions
Material and Visual Culture

Courses Taught

Undergraduate Courses:

Religions of the West

Virtual Religion: Religion in the Digital Age

From Jesus to Muhammad: History of Early Christianity

Satan: History, Poetics, and Politics of the Archenemy

Eastern Christianities

Material Christianities: The First Millennium (co-taught with Ivan Drpic)

Orthodox America (an SNF Paideia designated course)

Graduate Courses:

Syriac Christianity Past and Present

Worlds of Late Antiquity (co-taught with Cam Grey)

Orthodox America

Selected Publications

Books:

Stories between Christianity and Islam: Saints, Memory, and Cultural Exchange in Late Antiquity and Beyond. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2022.

Three Persian Martyr Acts: The Acts of Miles, Bishop of Susa, the Priest Abursam, and Deacon Sinai, the Martyrdom of Zebina and His Companions, and the Martyrdom of the Forty Martyrs of Beth Kashkraye. Edited and translated by Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Reyhan Durmaz, Michael Payne, Daniel Picus, Noah Tetenbaum. Piscataway, NJ. Gorgias Press, Forthcoming.

Jacob of Sarug's Homilies on Women Whom Jesus Met. Edited and translated by Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Sebastian Brock, Reyhan Durmaz, Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos, Michael Payne, and Daniel Picus. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2016.

Articles and Book Chapters:

"Religion, race, and letterpress: Orthodox Christians in 19th-century New York City through the lens of Kawkab America." Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Forthcoming.

"Five hundred bones from Constantinople: Monks, manuscripts, and memory at the eastern borders of Byzantium." Harvard Theological Review 115, no. 3 (2022): 363–86.

"Recent research in Syriac Studies and the recurring question of identity." Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 34 (2022): 140-61.

“Patronage and prestige in the countryside: The case of the Church of Mār Domeṭ in northern Mesopotamia.” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 80, no.1 (2021): 101–22.

“Saints, stories and sanctity between Christianity and Islam: The conversion of Najrān to Christianity in the Sīra of Muḥammad.” In Syriac Christian Culture: Beginnings to Renaissance. Edited by Aaron Butts and Robin Darling Young, 174–97. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2021.

“Hearing sanctity: Oral performance and aural consumption of hagiographical stories in the late antique and medieval Syriac milieu.” In Syriac Hagiography: Texts and Beyond. Edited by Flavia Ruani and Sergey Minov, 56–88. Brill, 2021.