Stephen
Shoemaker (Ph.D. ’97, Duke University)
teaches courses on the Christian traditions. His primary interests lie in
the ancient and early medieval Christian traditions, and more specifically in
early Byzantine and Near Eastern Christianity. His research focuses on
early devotion to the Virgin Mary, Christian apocryphal literature, and the
relations between Near Eastern Christianity and formative Islam. Prof.
Shoemaker is the author of The
Death of a Prophet: The End of Muhammad's Life and the Beginnings of Islam
(Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), a study of the "historical
Muhammad" that focuses on traditions about the end of his life. He
has also published numerous studies on early Christian traditions about Mary
(especially in apocrypha), including The
Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption (Oxford
University Press, 2002), a study of the earliest traditions of the end of Mary's
life that combines archaeological, liturgical, and literary evidence. This
volume also includes critical translations of many of the earliest narratives of
Mary's Dormition and Assumption, made from Ethiopic, Syriac, Georgian, Coptic,
and Greek. Prof. Shoemaker has recently published a translation of the
earliest Life of the Virgin
attributed to Maximus the Confessor (Yale University Press, 2012), a pivotal if overlooked late ancient text
that survives only in a Georgian translation. Currently he is working on a
book on early Marian piety as evidenced by ancient Christian apocrypha and the
translation of several eighth-century Christian martyrdoms from the early
Islamic Near East.
In addition, he is preparing a new critical edition of the early Syriac
Dormition narratives. Prof. Shoemaker has been awarded research
fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned
Societies, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center, the Alexander
von Humboldt Foundation, and the
National Endowment for the Humanities.
sshoemak
(at) uoregon (dot) edu