The PhD alum examines gendered violence in early Christianity
August 2025 – Drew Theological School PhD alum Jennifer Barry T’13 pushes the boundaries of traditional scholarship by interrogating the role of gendered violence at the heart of early Christian imagination in her forthcoming book, Gender Violence in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, September 2025).
Barry, associate professor of religion at the University of Mary Washington, is an expert in late ancient studies, early Christianity, later Roman antiquity, and gender studies. She is reshaping how scholars and students think about the history of early Christianity.
In Gender Violence in Late Antiquity, Barry argues that gender-based violence is not peripheral, rather fundamental to understanding early Christian history.
By analyzing hagiographical and doctrinal writings, Barry reveals how male authors used portrayals of feminized suffering to shape ideals of sanctity and power, exploiting themes of domestic abuse, martyrdom, and sexualized violence to reinforce their visions of piety.
Barry traces the origins of this project back to her time at Drew. “This research was heavily influenced by my advisors while at Drew University,” she reflected. “Both Virginia Burrus [former professor of early church history chair of the graduate division of religion] and Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre [Henry Anson Buttz Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity] were instrumental in the foundational questions that drove this project.”
Barry is also the author of Bishops in Flight: Exile and Displacement in Late Antiquity (2019).
