Dr. Margaret Y. MacDonald
Applicant

Margaret Y. MacDonald conducts research on early Christian communities. She is a specialist in the interpretation of the letters of Paul, raising questions about power, families, and constructions of gender. She teaches courses on the New Testament, the birth of Christianity in the ancient world, the body and religion, women and Christianity, and religion and childhood.

Dr. Syed Adnan Hussain
Co-Applicant

Dr. Syed Adnan Hussain (MTS, JD, PhD) is an Associate Professor and current Chair of the Department for the Study of Religion at Saint Mary’s University. His work focuses on the intersections of law and religion during the colonial and “postcolonial” periods. His research engages the history of Islam and Muslims under colonialism including the intersections of sex and gender therein. He is also an avid cinephile and has published on film and popular culture. He has on numerous occasions been retained by courts United States and Canada as a subject matter expert on Pakistani Muslims and terror groups in Pakistan. 

Dr. Marianne Bjelland Kartzow
Collaborator

Marianne Bjelland Kartzow is Professor of New Testament Studies at the University of Oslo, Norway. Her interests in teaching and research include gender and intersectional theory, early Christian history, social scientific criticism and biblical reception.

In addition to several articles and book chapters, she has authored three books: Gossip and Gender: Othering of Speech in the Pastoral Epistles (DeGruyter 2009); Destabilizing the Margins: An Intersectional Approach to Early Christian Memory (Wipf and Stock 2012); and The Slave Metaphor and Gendered Enslavement in Early Christian Discourse: Double Trouble Embodied (Routledge 2018).

Kartzow has recently edited and co-edited many volumes, including The Ambiguous Figure of the Neighbor in Jewish, Christian and Islamic texts and receptions (Routledge 2022); The Nordic Bible: Bible Reception in Contemporary Nordic Societies (DeGruyter 2023 with Kasper Bro Larsen and Outi Lehtipuu; and Religious Responses to Pandemics and Crises: Isolation, Survival, and #Covidchaos (Routledge 2023, with Sravana Borkataky-Varma and Christian A. Eberhart)

Sherry Simons Brown
Research Assistant

Sherry Brown is currently pursuing a master’s degree through the graduate program jointly offered by the Atlantic School of Theology and Saint Mary’s University. Her area of interest is intersectional feminist theology, specifically feminist and womanist interpretations of Pauline texts. Through her research she seeks to ask illuminating questions around how translations, anachronistic interpretations, and the relationship between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament have influenced today’s evangelical church culture. Prior to her current studies, Sherry earned an Honours Bachelor of Arts in English literature from the University of Toronto and studied Biblical Hebrew at Tyndale Seminary.

Zéa Jones
Research Assistant

Zéa is a graduate student with the Department of Religion at Saint Mary’s University, having recently completed their Honours BA in Anthropology and Religious Studies. Their current research looks at intersections between archaeology and religion, colonialism and secularism, material culture,  and how researchers and research institutions construct our understandings of religion in modern society. They are also interested in the relationships between language and research, religion and material culture, museums, and anti-colonial anthropological practices. They live in work near Kjipuktuk, the great harbour, in Mi’kma’ki.