Faculty Directory

Dr. Angela Kim Harkins was born in Seoul, Korea and grew up in the northwest side of Chicago, Illinois. She completed her M.A. degree in the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame with a concentration in biblical languages in 1997. She studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel under Emanuel Tov with funding from a Fulbright Fellowship in 1997-1998, an exciting year that coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. She returned to Notre Dame to begin her Ph.D. studies in the Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity area, with a minor in Syriac exegesis and Liturgical Studies. She wrote her dissertation on the Thanksgiving Hymns (Hebr. Hodayot) from Qumran under James C. VanderKam (2003).

Dr. Harkins arrived at the BC STM in 2015. She spent the previous two years in England where she held a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship at the University of Birmingham (309,235 Euros) for interdisciplinary research on religious experience and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Prior to this fellowship, Dr. Harkins was a tenured Associate Professor in the Religious Studies Department and a member of the Judaic Studies faculty at Fairfield University (Fairfield, CT), where she was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award by the College of Arts and Sciences in 2011.

Dr. Angela Kim Harkins is an active member of the Society of Biblical Literature and has chaired the Religious Experience in Antiquity section (2012-2017) and currently co-chairs the Prayer in Antiquity section. She also chairs the Qumran and Dead Sea Scrolls program unit of the International Society of Biblical Literature. She serves on the steering committee of the Space, Place, and Lived Experience in Antiquity (SBL). She has completed two terms on the SBL Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession (2017-2022). In 2021, Harkins served as the New England / Eastern Canada region of the SBL President. She has been a member of the Catholic Biblical Association since 1997 (full member in 2004). Dr. Harkins is a past board member of the Lilly National Network and Collegium: A Colloquy on Faith and the Intellectual Life. Dr. Harkins was a pre-tenure fellow at Wabash Center for Teaching Theology and Religion in 2010-2011, and two Wabash Peer-Mentoring Cluster Grant: “Non-canonical Texts, Non-canonical Bodies” (2018-2019), and “Korean-American Women and New Testament Studies” (2021-2022).

Dr. Harkins has published extensively on the topic of prayers, emotions, and religious experience in early Jewish and Christian texts. She has authored or edited eight books, and approximately three dozen scholarly articles and essays. Her latest monograph on religious experience and the early Christian text known as the Shepherd of Hermas is entitled, An Embodied Reading of the Shepherd of Hermas: The Book of Visions and its Role in Moral Formation, in the Studies in Ancient Religion and Culture series published by Equinox Publishing Ltd. (2023). Dr. Harkins has served as the executive editor of the Journal of Ancient Judaism (Brill) since 2022.

https://angelakimharkins.com/