Emily Olsen

Prior to joining FSU’s religion department for my M.A. (2020) and Ph.D. in the Religions of Western Antiquity track, I earned my B.A. (2017) in religious studies with a minor in Anthropology from Rutgers University. In addition to being trained broadly in the interdisciplinary humanities and pedagogical theories, I have received extensive philological training not limited to Classical Greek, Classical Ethiopic (Ge‘ez), Aramaic, and biblical Hebrew. As a historian of ancient religion, much of my work is guided by questions of ideological transmission and reception across ancient religious communities via texts and material culture.

While at FSU, I have been primarily interested in two areas of study and research: 1) the development of the demonic in ancient Judaism and Christianity and 2) race and ethnicity in the ancient world. I address the former with my dissertation, beginning my analysis with non-canonical texts like the Book of Jubilees and 1 Enoch’s Book of Watchers. Both these texts contain important passages about demons and evil and are essential to the modern scholar’s understanding of how these concepts developed in later Jewish and Christian traditions. The Book of Watchers attests our earliest Jewish account of the origin of evil spirits, explaining that evil spirits are, in fact, the souls of the ravenous giants who consumed human beings. Their insatiable appetites, cannibalism, and visceral hunger, I suggest, play a crucial role in how later ancient Jewish and Christian communities conceptualized demons and how they functioned within their worldviews—so much so that Christians have preserved terrifyingly gruesome accounts of ravenous demoniacs as late as the 5th century CE. My dissertation, under the supervision of Dr. Matthew Goff, traces the close association of demons and hunger through ancient Jewish sources of the Hellenistic age to the Christian ascetic communities of Late Antiquity.

My interest in ancient conceptions of race and ethnicity has been pursued alongside my study of demons throughout my time at FSU. In my work on this, I seek to bring modern debates and ideas about race into dialogue with those of the ancient world. For example, my most recent project, which investigated the use of race and color in 1 Enoch’s Animal Apocalypse, built upon the work of scholars of antiquity and modernity alike (i.e., David Goldenberg, Benjamin Isaac, and Sylvester Johnson).