Call for Papers 2026

For the inaugural 2026 meeting of our research group, Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in the Bible and the Ancient Mediterranean, we invite papers that explore how ancient identities were forged, reshaped, or contested in contexts of conflict, tension, and instability. Our theme for this year is Contested Identities in the Bible and the Ancient Mediterranean: Identity Formation in Contexts of Struggle and Conflict.

Moments of social, political, and religious upheaval often become conditions for the shaping of identity. In such environments, boundaries between “self” and “other” harden, communal belonging is negotiated, and ethnic or religious identities gain sharper definition. This inaugural session seeks to examine how conflict, whether military, civic, political, or theological, shaped racial, ethnic, and communal identities in biblical texts and across the ancient Mediterranean world. Our guiding question for this session is: How did conflict shape identity? We welcome papers that approach this question through close readings of biblical texts, analyses of specific historical or cultural contexts, comparative work with Greco-Roman sources, or theoretically informed explorations of identity formation, boundary-making, and communal belonging.

We use “race” to describe a socially constructed set of categories that emerge within and because of social and political realities. While this framework can be a helpful heuristic for modern interpreters, presenters who use it are encouraged to qualify their language, especially when engaging ancient concepts that do not map neatly onto modern categories.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Israel and Egypt in Exodus

• the Assyrian conquest and its aftermath

• identity formation in 1–2 Maccabees during the Maccabean Revolt

• Roman citizenship and the negotiation of identity in the New Testament

• Samaritan identity in the Gospels

• Gentile inclusion and debates over belonging in the early church

• civic and ethnic tensions in Philo, Josephus, or other Second Temple writers

• persecution, martyrdom, and Christian identity under Roman rule 

This year’s session will also contribute to a collected volume of essays to be published with an academic press. While participation in the volume is optional, we encourage presenters to consider contributing. Although the volume will primarily emerge from this year’s themed session, presenters from other 2026 sessions whose papers fit the focus and scope of the project may also be invited to contribute. For those that do not plan to attend the annual conference, we still welcome submissions for our edited volume.