Tracy Maria Lemos

Professor

Cross Appointments: Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies

Email: tracy.lemos@utoronto.ca

Website:

Areas of Interest

  • Comparative history of violence
  • Masculinity
  • Dehumanization
  • Genocide Studies
  • Sexual Violence
  • Trauma and Healing
  • Religion and Violence, especially violence in the Bible
  • Gender and the Bible
  • Family and Kinship

I am currently writing a book on healing from dehumanizing violence and have begun another research project, with Andrea Allen (Anthropology/CDTS, University of Toronto) on queer kinship.  I would welcome graduate students in any of the areas of interest listed above.

Biography

T. M. Lemos is a scholar with wide-ranging interests and expertise.  Trained in biblical studies, religion, and the ancient history of Israel/Palestine, her focus has turned in the past decade to the comparative history of violence while continuing to foreground issues of masculinity and women’s status. Her second book, Violence and Personhood in Ancient Israel and Comparative Contexts, published by Oxford University Press in 2017, examines the intersections of hypermasculinity, dehumanizing violence, and personhood in ancient Israel, wider ancient West Asia, and the contemporary United States.  She also co-edited the first volume of the Cambridge World History of Genocide (2023), authoring chapters on genocide in ancient Israel and ancient Mesopotamia.  She is currently writing a book on healing from dehumanizing violence that examines how communities develop robust modes of responding to dehumanization that are both specific to the forms of violence deployed against them and also reflect and draw inspiration from the responses of other dehumanized communities.  The book’s treatment spans from antiquity to our present moment, demonstrating linkages between ancient and contemporary concerns.  In addition to these works, she has published articles on many different aspects of violence, focusing especially on constructions of gender, dehumanization, torture, sexualized violence, and the study of genocide in ancient and modern contexts.  Many of her works have addressed violence in biblical texts and the relationship between violence and various aspects of what one might call “religion”—conceptions of the deity, ritual, purity and impurity, sacrifice, and hierarchy.

Lemos is also interested in the history of kinship and family.  Her first book, published in 2010 with Cambridge University Press, explores connections between marriage customs, women’s status, and changes in kinship structures occurring in ancient Palestine over the course of a millennium.  She has recently returned to the subject of family, beginning a collaborative project with Andrea S. Allen, an anthropologist specializing in race and queer sexuality, examining the development of new forms of kinship in queer communities in contemporary Canada and the United States.

What joins these disparate foci together for Lemos is an interest in how treatment of particular bodies correlates with patterns of inclusion and exclusion and how groups replicate, respond to, and resist these patterns.  In her work, she seeks to join together an interest in transhistorical and cross-cultural patterns with the particularities of time and place, the analytical with the ethical, and the deconstructive with the restorative.  It is her view that critical analysis without empathy too often becomes a form of sophistry, and a focus on the past without an eye to present injustices risks becoming vacuous escapism. On the other hand, all forms of injustice have their roots in the larger trends and knotty peculiarities of history.  For these reasons, Lemos pursues in her historiography of violence and gender a complex methodology that unites all of these diverse but pivotal concerns.

Education

PhD, Yale University

BA, Brown University

Selected Works

Books

Våld och vapen i Bibelns värld och vår: Två essäer.  (Violence and Weaponry in the World of the Bible and in Ours: Two Essays.) Translated into Swedish by Thomas Kazen. Tro & Liv Bibel 1. Stockholm: Enskilda Högskolan Stockholm, 2020.  

Violence and Personhood in Ancient Israel and Comparative Contexts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.  

Marriage Gifts and Social Change in Ancient Palestine: 1200 BCE to 200 CE. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.  Paperback edition, 2014.  

Selected Edited Volumes

Ben Kiernan, T. M. Lemos, and Tristan Taylor, eds. Cambridge World History of Genocide, Volume 1: Genocide in the Ancient, Medieval, and Premodern Worlds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.

T. M. Lemos, Jordan D. Rosenblum, Karen B. Stern, and Debra Ballentine, eds. With the Loyal You Show Yourself Loyal: Essays on Relationships in the Hebrew Bible in Honor of Saul M. Olyan. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2021.

Select Articles and Book Chapters

“Genocide in Ancient Israelite and Early Jewish Sources.” Pages 185-208 in Cambridge World History of Genocide, Volume 1, edited by Ben Kiernan, T. M. Lemos, and Tristan Taylor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.

With Seth Richardson. “Genocide in Mesopotamia in the Bronze and Iron Ages.” Pages 209-234 in Cambridge World History of Genocide, Volume 1, edited by Ben Kiernan, T. M. Lemos, and Tristan Taylor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.

“Israelite Bows and American Guns.” Pages 77-92 in God and Guns: The Bible and American Gun Culture, edited by Carly L. Crouch and Christopher Hays. Foreword by Stanley Hauerwas. Westminster John Knox Press, 2021.

“Order from Chaos: Comparing Approaches to Violence in Anthropology, Assyriology, and the Study of the Hebrew Bible’,” Currents in Biblical Research 18.2 (2020): 160-175.

“Dispossessing Nations: Population Growth, Scarcity, and Genocide in Ancient Israel and Twentieth-century Rwanda.” Pages 27-66 in Ritual Violence in the Hebrew Bible: New Perspectives, edited by Saul M. Olyan.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.  

“The Apotheosis of Rage: Divine Anger and the Psychology of Israelite Trauma,” Biblical Interpretation 23 (2015): 101-121.

“Where There is Dirt, Is There System?: Revisiting Biblical Purity Constructions,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 37.3 (2013): 265-294.

“The Emasculation of Exile: Hypermasculinity and Feminization in the Book of Ezekiel.” Pages 377-393 in Interpreting Exile: Interdisciplinary Studies of Displacement and Deportation in Biblical and Modern Contexts, edited by Brad E. Kelle, Frank Ritchel Ames, and Jacob Wright. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011.

“‘Like the Eunuch Who Does Not Beget’: Gender, Mutilation, and Negotiated Status in the Ancient Near East.” Pages 47-66 in Disability Studies and Biblical Literature, edited by Jeremy Schipper and Candida R. Moss. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

“The Universal and the Particular: Mary Douglas and the Politics of Impurity.” The Journal of Religion 89.2 (2009): 236-251.

“Shame and Mutilation of Enemies in the Hebrew Bible.” Journal of Biblical Literature 125.2 (2006): 225-241.

Honours and Awards

2020

Inaugural Recipient, Huron University College Award for Outstanding Faculty Research

Teaching

Undergraduate Courses:

2024-2025 Academic year

DTS305 – Special Topics in Diaspora and Transnational Studies | Filth: Transnational Perspectives on Dirt, Garbage, and Impurity

This class will draw on research from anthropology, religious studies, environmental studies, and other fields to examine transnational, cross-cultural, and diasporic perspectives on filth and dirt and how these concepts are deployed to create and reinforce social hierarchies in a multitude of global contexts.  Discussions will address such topics as colonial encounters and otherization through ideas of cleanliness; the weaponization of filth in transnational practices of violence; the commercialization and exportation of trash from wealthy nations to the global south; migrants, cleaning/cleanliness, and dehumanization; and impurity, gender, and sexuality in diaspora communities.