Dr. Laura J. Hunt BRE, MTS, PhD

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Honorary Fellow

Institute of Education and Humanities

Tel: +1 734 461-9795
Email: laura.hunt@uwtsd.ac.uk

Role in the University

My Honorary Fellowship at UWTSD allows me to collaborate with the university through resource sharing, mutual recognition, and joint projects within New Testament Studies.

Background

After my BRE and MTS at Michigan Theological Seminary, I completed my PhD at UWTSD under the supervision of Dr. Catrin Williams in 2017. My work was subsequently published by Mohr Siebeck in the WUNT 2 series, in 2019, as Jesus Caesar: A Roman Reading of the Johannine Trial Narrative.

Since then I have worked as an adjunct at various US schools and universities, including Spring Arbor University, Ashland Theological Seminary, The King’s University, Multnomah University, and the East Michigan Training Institute.

I regularly attend SBL and have contributed papers in various sections including Cognitive Linguistics in Biblical Interpretation, Writing Social-Scientific Commentaries of the New Testament, Institute for Biblical Research, and Johannine Literature.

Member Of

  • Society of Biblical Literature
  • British New Testament Society
  • Bayes and Bible Project, hosted by Universität Basel, funded by the cogito foundation
  • Reviewer for the Journal for the Study of the New Testament

Academic Interests

Most of my undergraduate teaching has focused on the New Testament and includes courses such as:

  • Biblical Perspectives (an overview of the whole Bible)
  • Survey of the New Testament
  • Pauline Letters
  • John and Jewish Context

My teaching at the seminary level has principally focused on teaching Greek and hermeneutics including:

  • Greek 1, 2 & 3
  • Advanced Greek courses centring on the Gospel of Mark, and Colossians & Philemon.
  • Studies in John and Early Judaism
  • Engaging Texts and Contexts (hermeneutics)
  • Fundamentals of Biblical Interpretation

Research Interests

My research interests focus on communication through texts, particularly Umberto Eco’s semiotics, multilingualism, cognitive metaphors and social identity.

My PhD resulted in a monograph arguing for the relevance of elements of the ancient Roman cultural encyclopaedia to interpretations of John 18:28–19:22, Jesus Caesar: A Roman Reading of the Johannine Trial Narrative (2019).

I contributed a chapter on social identity in 1 Peter to the T&T Clark Commentary on Social Identity in the New Testament (2020).

A series of conference papers on cognitive metaphors resulted in an extensive analysis of breastfeeding metaphors in the New Testament for the Journal for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies entitled “Alien and Degenerate Milk: Embodiment, Structure and Viewpoint in Four Nursing Metaphors.”

My current research brings together social identity theory and Bayes’ Theorem to discuss processes and cautions for reading audiences from ancient texts. 

Expertise

My professional expertise includes:

  • The Gospel of John
  • Umberto Eco’s Semiotics
  • Social Identity Theory
  • Cognitive Metaphor Theory
  • Latin-Greek Multilingualism in the ancient world

Publications