Center Leadership, Advisory Board, and Remembrance

Center Director: Dr. Davis Hankins

Dr. Davis Hankins is an associate professor of religious studies in the Department of Philosophy and Religion. He holds a B.S. from North Carolina State University, an M.Div. from Columbia Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible from Emory University.

Hankins’ research focuses on the intersection of political economy, religion and literature in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean world. His first book, The Book of Job and the Immanent Genesis of Transcendence (Northwestern University Press, 2015), received the 2017 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise. He recently submitted a book manuscript on the socioeconomic and political transformations that occurred under the Ptolemaic administration of Egypt, and is currently completing research on related changes in Judaea and in Jewish intellectual history under the Ptolemies in the early Hellenistic period.

A native of North Carolina, Hankins joined App State’s Department of Philosophy and Religion in 2011, and has served as an affiliate faculty member in CJHPS since 2016. He teaches surveys of the Hebrew Bible, Judaism and the New Testament, and other courses on prophecy and justice, gender and sexuality and visual art and religion. In 2019, he completed the Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization at Northwestern University’s Holocaust Educational Foundation.