Professor Katherine E. Southwood
About
Professor Katherine E. Southwood is Professor of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament in the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in Theology and Religion at St John's College, Oxford.
Teaching is at the heart of Professor Southwood's academic work and her research focuses on primary evidence, such Hebrew Bible material and evidence out of the Hebrew Bible including manuscripts, inscriptions, artefacts, papyri and ostraca, dated to the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods. Interdisciplinarity and methodological rigor are key to her approach.
Professor Southwood completed an undergraduate degree in Theology in Durham, followed by a Masters in Classical Hebrew, then a DPhil in Oxford. She was Kennicott Fellow in Oxford before taking up a post in St Mary’s University College, Twickenham then returned to Oxford in 2013.
Watch online
Professor Katherine Southwood talks about Studying Theology at St John's College, Oxford.
The Journal of the Oxford Graduate Theological Society (JOGTS) Shorts series:
- God-Talk: An Introduction to Theology, Episode 1: What is Theology and Religion?
- God-Talk: An Introduction to Theology, Episode 2: In What Ways is Theology Still Relevant Today?
- God-Talk: An Introduction to Theology, Episode 3: Creation
- God-Talk: An Introduction to Theology, Episode 4: God
- God-Talk: An Introduction to Theology, Episode 5: The Role of Religious Practice
Expertise
- Hebrew Bible / Old Testament / Tanakh
- Books of Ezra and Nehemiah, Job, Judges
- Interdisciplinary methods
- Problem of evil / suffering
- Wisdom literature (in the Hebrew Bible)
- Post-exilic period
- The value of the humanities
- Marriage in the Bible
Selected publications
- The Civic Value of the Humanities: A Case for Compassion. (Palgrave Critical University Studies). Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, forthcoming September 2025
- Death Imagined: Ancient Perceptions of Death and Dying. Co-edited with Karolina Sekita. LSAH. Liverpool (2025)
- Psalms and the Use of the Critical Imagination: Essays in Honour of Susan Gillingham. Co-edited with Holly Morse. LBHOTS. London: T&T Clark (2022)
- Job’s Body and the Dramatized Comedy of Moralising. RSBW. London: Routledge (2021)
- Involuntary Migration in the Ancestral Narratives. Co-edited with Casey Strine in Hebrew Studies 60 (2019), 39–106.
- Women and Exilic Identity in the Hebrew Bible. Co-edited with Martien Halvorson-Taylor. LBHOTS. London: T&T Clark (2018)
- Marriage by Capture in the Book of Judges: An Anthropological Approach. SOTSMS. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2017)
- Ethnicity and the Mixed Marriage Crisis in Ezra 9–10: An Anthropological Approach. OTM. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2012)
