Ki-Eun Jang

Dr. Ki-Eun Jang specializes in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Middle Eastern Studies.
With an interest in advancing the socially engaged humanities in the study of the
Hebrew Bible, her research bridges the social world of ancient West Asia that produced
the Hebrew Bible and the intellectual and cultural legacies of modernity that shape the
ways in which communities of readers conceive of the past and envision the present.
Her first book, Contesting Labeled Identities: The Sociology of Gentilics in Biblical and
Northwest Semitic Literature, interrogates the history of ideas of race and
ethnicity—especially those informed by Fredrik Barth’s “ethnic groups and boundaries.”
Bringing these critiques to bear on the literary-historical study of the Hebrew Bible and
cognate literature, the book examines how modern assumptions about classification
and identification have both shaped and constrained hermeneutical possibilities about
the ancient past and its peoples.

Dr. Jang is currently advancing a project focused on the historiographical, legal, religio-
political, and literary-poetic constructions of Canaanite identities and discourses, tracing
their epistemological legacies from the Hebrew Bible to modern museums. Her recent
research has also turned to questions about how translated Bibles in contemporary
Korea function as acts of interpretation in their own right.

Prior to joining the Theology Department at Fordham University in 2022, Dr. Jang was a visiting assistant professor of Hebrew Bible and Near Eastern Studies at Union Theological Seminary in New York (2021–2022) and a postdoctoral lecturer in the Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University (2021). 

At Fordham, she has taught undergraduate and graduate courses such as Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, The Bible as Migration Literature, Otherness in the Hebrew Bible, and Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Interpretation.

Ph.D., in Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Studies, New York University
M.A., Hebrew University of Jerusalem
B.A., Korea University

Literary history of the Hebrew Bible; law and identities in the Hebrew Bible and the
contemporary world; time and historiography in antiquity; ancient Hebrew and
Northwest Semitic philology; postcolonial criticism and biblical studies; critical diaspora
and ethnic studies; the Bible and global Asia.

Dr. Jang's research profile can be accessed at https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6498-3590

Monograph

Contesting Labeled Identities: The Sociology of Gentilics in Biblical and Northwest
Semitic Literature. Forschungen zum Alten Testament II 180. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,
2026.

Edited Journal Issue

Catastrophe, Recovery, and Asian/Asian Diasporic Religion and Theology. Special
Collection in Journal of Ecumenical Studies, vol. 60, no. 4 (2025). Co-edited and co-
authored introduction with Minjung Noh.

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

“The Philistine David, Contested Friendship, and the Politics of Solidarity: A Decolonial
Reading of 1 Samuel 27–30.” Edited by Mahri Leonard-Fleckman and Rachelle
Gilmore. Themes and Issues in Biblical Studies: Samuel. Sheffield: Equinox
(forthcoming).

“The Migration of Racial Discourses in Biblical Interpretation: From Europe to the
Korean Peninsula in the Long Nineteenth Century.” Edited by Muhammad Shafiq et al.
Race and Racism in the Sacred Texts and Human Contexts (forthcoming).

“Bodily Disasters and the Crisis of Body Politics in the Hebrew Bible.” Concilium:
International Journal of Theology, no. 3, special issue, Theologies of Body: Drawing
Cartographies (2026): 35–44.

“The Buried Abimelech Tradition in Judges 10:1: A Case of Literary Doubling.” Vetus
Testamentum vol. 76, no. 2 (2026): 193–216. Online publication date: Apr 30, 2025.
https://doi.org/10.1163/15685330-bja10203

“The 1923 Kanto Massacre, the Gibeonites in 2 Samuel 21, and Reinscribing Homo
Sacer through a Hermeneutics of Mnemonic Solidarity.” Journal of Ecumenical Studies,
vol. 60, no. 4 (2025): 518–36. https://doi.org/10.1353/ecu.2025.a977898

“Biblical Aramaic Gentilics Reconsidered: Nonethnic Labels, Relational Adjectives, and
the Mechanisms of Classification.” Aramaic Studies, vol. 23, no. 1 (2025): 1–21.
https://doi.org/10.1163/17455227-bja10057

“Literary Historiography as a Method for State-Building: Competing Traditions and
Trans-historical Memories of Saul and David’s Kingship.” Pages 121–38. Edited by
Jaeyoung Jeon et al. King, State, Empire in the Hebrew Bible: Postcolonial
Perspectives and Contemporary Relevance in Korea. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2025.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111707341-007

“The Problems of Sons of Gods, Daughters of Humans, and the Nephilim in Genesis
6:1–4: A Reassessment.” Religions 2025, 16(8): 972.
https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16080972

“Otherness in the Hebrew Bible.” Edited by Christopher Matthews. Oxford
Bibliographies in Biblical Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, May 23, 2024.
https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780195393361-0332

“Saul’s Israel, the ‘Hebrews,’ and Identity Politics in 1 Samuel 13–14.” Journal of Biblical
Literature, vol. 142, no. 4 (2023): 589–608. https://doi.org/10.15699/jbl.1424.2023.3

“The Circulation of the Storm-God’s Struggle with the Death-God Motif in Ugarit and
Babylonia.” Semitica, vol. 65 (2023): 5–31. https://doi.org/10.2143/SE.65.0.3293109

“‘Nobody’ as an Official Identity: Biblical Gentilics, the Life of ‘FNU,’ and Asian
America,” Journal of Asian American Theological Forum 10.2 (2023): 11–15.

*“The ‘Energic’ -n of the Non-Prefix Conjugation in Ugaritic: A New Proposal.” Semitica,
vol. 64 (2022): 5–20. https://doi.org/10.2143/SE.64.0.3291265

Book Reviews

Review of Hindus and Their Christian Bible by R. S. Sugirtharajah, Biblical Interpretation
(forthcoming).

Review of Race and Biblical Studies: Antiracism Pedagogy for the Classroom, eds. Tat-
siong Benny Liew and Shelly Matthews. Review of Biblical Literature, vol. 26 (2024):
558–61. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.31106784.160 (published online in September 2023)

(Solicited) Review of Reading Biblical Texts Together: Pursuing Minoritized Biblical
Criticism, eds. Tat-siong Benny Liew and Fernando F. Segovia. Catholic Biblical
Quarterly, vol. 85, no. 4 (2023): 809–12. https://doi.org/10.1353/cbq.2023.a908847

Review of The Finger of the Scribe: How Scribes Learned to Write the Bible by William
M. Schniedewind. Ancient Jew Review (2022). https://www.ancientjewreview.com/read/2022/1/31/book-note-the-finger-
of-the-scribe-how-scribes-learned-to-write-the-bible 

(Solicited) Review of Behind the Scenes of the Old Testament: Cultural, Social, and
Historical Contexts, eds. Jonathan S. Greer, John W. Hilber, and John H. Walton.
Catholic Biblical Quarterly, vol. 82, no. 1 (2020): 152–55.
https://doi.org/10.1353/cbq.2020.0035

Public Scholarship

“The Influencer in Eden: De/coloniality of the AI Data Paradigm and the Counter-
exegesis of Human Life.” Contending Modernities, November 18, 2025.
https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/decoloniality/influencer-in-eden 

“Debates about Migration Have Never been Simple—Just Look at the Hebrew Bible.”
The Conversation, September 15, 2022. https://doi.org/10.64628/AAI.cw6v944fc