Michal Beth Dinkler

Professor Michal Dinkler’s research lies at the intersection of New Testament and literary theory, focusing especially on the usefulness of narratological theories for the study of New Testament narratives. Her first book, Silent Statements: Narrative Representations of Speech and Silence in the Gospel of Luke (2013), demonstrates how close attention to speech and silence illuminates the plot, characterization, themes, and narrative rhetoric of Luke’s Gospel. Her second book, Literary Theory and New Testament Scholarship (YUP, in progress), guides students and scholars of the New Testament through the maze of heterogeneous phenomena associated with contemporary literary theory, and offers practical examples that illustrate the interpretive benefits of an updated literary approach to the New Testament. Professor Dinkler’s work has been published in journals such as the Journal of Biblical Literature, Journal for the Study of the New Testament, and Biblical Interpretation, among others. She co-chairs the Speech and Talk: Discourses and Social Practices in the Ancient Mediterranean World Section of the Society of Biblical Literature and serves on the Steering Committees for the Gospel of Luke and Book of Acts Sections, and on the editorial board of Catholic Biblical Quarterly. She is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA).

Since October 2018, she has been a participant in the project Oxford - Yale workshop on Exemplarity, funded by the TORCH International Partnership Scheme.