Dakota Hampton

Education 

B.A. - Oral Roberts University, Historical and Philosophical Theology, 2018

M.A.R. - Yale Divinity School, History of Christianity, 2022

Biography

Dakota is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity. Raised in a working-class home in Illinois, Dakota transferred from his local community college to complete his undergraduate studies in Historical and Philosophical Theology at Oral Roberts University in 2018. He was awarded the Outstanding Academic Achievement Award in Historical Theology for his senior thesis which focused on early Christian ritual development during the Quartodeciman Controversy. He earned a MAR (History of Christianity) from Yale Divinity school in 2022 before beginning doctoral studies at Fordham.

His dissertation investigates the origins of the earliest Christian celebration of Christ’s death,
burial, and resurrection. Challenging the methodological frameworks that have traditionally
assumed a single historical origin for Christian Pascha, he argues that Pascha is best understood as pluriform ritual traditions whose meaning developed through embodied performance, communal memory, and changing social contexts. Bringing together ritual theory, memory studies, liturgical history, and archaeology, his research proposes a new methodological approach to the origins of Christian Pascha and its relationship to Jewish Pesach. His broader interests include early Christian ritual, material culture, archaeology, Jewish-Christian relations, and New Testament reception history.

Outside of his academic work, Dakota is the father of two and enjoys biking, cooking, and discovering how history continues to shape the questions we ask about faith, community, and the human experience.

Conference Presentations

Presented: “A Spiritual Wedding: The Women in Procession at the Christian Building in Dura-Europos” at The North American Patristic Society, May 21, 2026

Upcoming: “From Moriah to Golgotha: The Binding of Isaac in Early Jewish–Christian Interpretation” at The Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, November 23, 2026