Maria E. Doerfler

Maria E. Doerfler serves as Associate Professor of Late Antiquity in Yale University’s Department of Religious Studies. Her scholarship focuses chiefly on interpretive practices in late antique communities, with a particular eye towards individual and communal crises. Her monograph Jephthah’s Daughter, Sarah’s Son: The Death of Children in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 2020) won the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book Prize in the History of Religion category. This year anticipates the publication of two additional books, including a volume on the socio-historical, ritual, and communal visions that emerge from the so-called necrosis (burial hymns) ascribed to Ephrem the Syrian Death and Afterlife in Syriac Christianity: Social Identity and Emotional Communities (Cambridge University, 2025). She is currently working on finalizing a volume on Law and Religion in Late Antiquity and beginning work on a monograph on migration and ritual and a shorter volume on law and New Religious Movements in the U.S.