For the 2025–2026 academic year, Coogan will be on research leave as a Member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
I am a historian of religion, textuality, and enslavement in the Roman Mediterranean, with a focus on the New Testament and early Christianity. My research interrogates overlooked entanglements between intellectual and social history, the embodied and inevitably political configurations in which texts, ideas, and social formations emerge. Combining critical theory with textual and material analysis, I aspire to disrupt familiar certainties and prompt fresh interdisciplinary conversations. In the classroom, I invite students to creative encounters with the New Testament in light of its manifold contexts, from the ancient Mediterranean to global reading communities today.
My award-winning first book Eusebius the Evangelist (Oxford University Press, 2023) analyzes how the fourth-century scholar Eusebius of Caesarea employed emerging technologies to reconfigure the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. For over a thousand years and in more than a dozen languages, the “Eusebian apparatus” shaped Gospel reading in the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, and Europe. This neglected history is central both to the formation of a “New Testament” and to the reception of Gospel literature.
My current book project, The Invention of Gospel Literature, locates early Christian debates about Gospel literature and textual difference in a broader Roman politics of reading, crossing disciplinary boundaries between religion and classics.
I completed my PhD at the University of Notre Dame (2020). Prior to coming to JST-SCU, I was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Oxford (2020–2022). My work has also been supported by competitive fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Studies (Princeton), the Loeb Classical Library Foundation, the Catholic Biblical Association, and the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (Hamburg).
I am a faculty member in the Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology Graduate Group at UC Berkeley and of the Core Doctoral Faculty in the GTU Department of Sacred Texts and Their Interpretation.
I supervise a wide range of projects related to the New Testament and early Christianity. I particularly encourage applications from students interested in Gospel literature, reception history, social history, and the history of enslavement.
- Gospel Literature
- Early Christianity and Enslavement
- Mark from the Margins
- Advanced Greek Readings
- New Testament Research Methods (doctoral)
- Writing, Enslavement, and Power in the Roman Mediterranean, 100 BCE–300 CE, edited by Jeremiah Coogan, Candida R. Moss, and Joseph A. Howley. Cultures of Reading in the Ancient Mediterranean. New York: Oxford University Press, 2025.
- Eusebius the Evangelist: Rewriting the Fourfold Gospel in Late Antiquity. Cultures of Reading in the Ancient Mediterranean. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. Awarded the J. P. Gumbert Award (Hamburg), the Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise (Heidelberg), and the Alexander-Böhlig-Preis (Berlin).
- “The Order of Gospel Books: Heresy, Anthology, and Authorship in Late Antiquity.” Early Christianity 16, no. 1 (2025): 9–23.
- “Jesus in Christian Material Culture.” Pages 154–170 in The New Cambridge Companion to Jesus, ed. Markus Bockmuehl. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
- “The Textual Demiurge: Social Status and the Academic Discourse of Early Christian Forgery,” co-authored with Candida R. Moss. New Testament Studies 70, no. 3 (2024): 307–323.
- “Tatian’s Gospel and the Dura Fragment: Divergent Modes of Synthetic Gospel Writing.” Early Christianity 15, no. 3 (2024): 299–321.
- “The Socioeconomics of Fabrication: Textuality, Authenticity, and Class in the Roman Mediterranean,” co-authored with Candida R. Moss and Joseph A. Howley. Arethusa 57, no. 2 (2024): 227–253.
- “Reading (in) a Quadriform Cosmos: Gospel Books and the Early Christian Bibliographic Imagination.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 31, no. 1 (2023): 85–103. Awarded the 2021 Paul J. Achtemeier Award for New Testament Scholarship.
- “Meddling with the Gospel: Celsus, Early Christian Textuality, and the Politics of Reading.” Novum Testamentum 65, no. 3 (2023): 400–422.
- “The Ways that Parted in the Library: The Gospels according to Matthew and according to the Hebrews in Late Ancient Heresiology.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 74, no. 3 (2023): 473–490. Awarded the 2021 Eusebius Prize.