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Dayna Kalleres

Associate Professor

Dayna Kalleres
  • 6th College Bldg 1/Ridge Walk
    Room 242
    Mail Code: 0410

Ph.D. (Brown)

Associate Professor of Program for the Study of Religion

Office Hours
Director: Program for the Study of Religion
UCSD Hellman Fellow

Early Christianity

Dayna Kalleres received her Ph.D. in the Department of Religious Studies at Brown University, with a specialization in Early Christianity, in May of 2002. Her dissertation was entitled Exorcising the Devil to Silence Christ’s Enemies: Ritualized Speech Practices in Late Antique Christianity. After finishing her doctorate, Dr. Kalleres spent three years as an Andrew Mellon Stanford Humanities Post-Doctoral Fellow; during 2005-06, she held an appointment as a lecturer in the Religious Studies Department at Stanford as well as an Assistant Professor at the University of the Pacific.

Her teaching and research interests include: critical theories of religion; the deployment of the categories of gender, sexuality, and the body in the formation of religious boundaries in late antiquity; the intersection between ritual practice and theological conflict; the relationship between "magical" and religious (Christian, polytheist and Jewish) ritual practice.

Her current book project investigates the interrelationship between of demonology and embodiment in the construction of Christian Subjectivity in the Late Ancient Antioch (Antakya in southeastern Turkey).
Daughters of Hecate: Women and Magic in the Ancient World. Ed. Kimberly Stratton with Dayna S. Kalleres (forthcoming August 2007)

"Demonology and Divine Illumination: A Consideration of Eight Texts of Gregory of Nazianzus," (Vigiliae Christianae: A Review of Early Christian Life and Language, forthcoming 2007)

"Cultivating True Sight at the Center of the World: Cyril of Jerusalem and the Lenten Catechumenate," (Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, September 2005)
Coming soon...