JST-SCU Faculty Member Wins Prestigious Fellowships
Berkeley, CA, April 28, 2025—Jeremiah Coogan, Assistant Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University (JST-SCU), has been awarded two prestigious fellowships: the Mellon Fellowship for Assistant Professors at the School of Historical Studies of the Institute for Advanced Study and the Loeb Classical Library Foundation Fellowship from Harvard University. These fellowships will support his research next year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
Coogan’s project, "The Invention of Gospel Literature: Bibliographic Imagination and the Politics of Reading in the Roman Mediterranean," offers a fresh perspective on how the category of "Gospel" as a distinctive literary form was constructed and why this matters. His research explores how thinkers in the Roman Mediterranean, both Christian and non-Christian, developed and used literary-critical concepts within a broader politics of reading. Coogan’s work challenges traditional scholarly perspectives that separate early Christian intellectuals from their contemporaries, demonstrating that the invention of Gospel literature was a creative process involving ingenuity and conflict.
Coogan’s innovative approach combines rigorous textual study with social history, drawing on a wide range of sources, including literary texts, papyrological evidence, and scientific and technical texts. His research promises to advance scholarship in the fields of religion and classics and provide new insights into the influence of philological practice on negotiations of knowledge, authority, and cultural value.
A historian of the New Testament and early Christianity, Coogan’s research focuses on Gospel reading, the social history of early Christianity, and the history of enslavement. His 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. Coogan holds a PhD from the University of Notre Dame (2020) and was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Oxford (2020–2022).
About the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University
The Jesuit School of Theology is a global ministry of the Society of Jesus and a graduate school of Santa Clara University. It is an international center for innovative theological education and formation rooted in the lived realities of diverse communities of faith. Embracing synodality, the school empowers women and men to serve and lead in the global Catholic Church.