Esther Brownsmith, PhD
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brownsmith.bsky.social
Esther Brownsmith, PhD
@brownsmith.bsky.social
1.8K followers 330 following 250 posts
Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Dayton. Studying dead languages and living ideas. Interested in Hebrew Bible, gender, fanfic theory, and accessible, liberatory pedagogy. She/her.
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brownsmith.bsky.social
This stanza from a 1937 Polish poem really spoke to me in these times.
Transcription: How dare you have written about roses, When history burned like woods in summer heat? In today’s libraries the custodian dusts history volumes, And outside the window – returning with spring, Sappho sings a nightingale, How her heart dictates. Róże dla Safony (Roses for Sappho), By Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, Trans. Aleksandra Gajowy
June 13, 2025 at 4:07 PM
brownsmith.bsky.social
So honored that the inimitable @qgpennyworth.com used a poem that I wrote as part of a mini-zine/pop card! Check it out and share it if you like.
A 19th-century drawing of a woman sitting in an armchair and reading. Accompanying it is a poem by Esther Brownsmith: "What was it like to live in those times?", they will ask. Well, I will say, there was a lot of compulsively refreshing social media, a lot of bracing myself every time I pulled up the news, a lot of telling my friends that I loved them, because I couldn't tell them that things would be okay. And once, my therapist told me to take a spa day. So I sat in the hot water, and I tried not to think about Gaza or Ukraine or Roe or ICE or— and the water jets timed out. I looked down at my own body; I saw a diaphanous blanket of pinprick bubbles, each one clinging to a hair so faint and fine I'd forgotten they existed. A cocoon of air, stubbornly refusing to float from my skin. (The bubbles are not a metaphor for grace, or resilience, or hope. They simply startled me into seeing my flesh anew.) That is what it is like.
June 12, 2025 at 12:30 PM
brownsmith.bsky.social
Tl;dr: Not all scripture uses the mode of fanfic, but some of it does—and recognizing those parallels helps us to understand the goals of the biblical authors better.
A blonde white woman says "We have the same bedazzled Bible!"
June 3, 2025 at 5:34 PM
brownsmith.bsky.social
Is the Bible fan fiction? A thread. 📜 ​​
A "Fleabag" screencap that depicts a white brunette woman in the bathtub, reading a Bible. She looks aghast at the camera with a hand over her mouth.
June 3, 2025 at 5:31 PM
brownsmith.bsky.social
I know that celebrating anything these days seems tone deaf. I know. But: if you've been waiting to read my book, I am so pleased to share that it is now officially available free to read in Open Access. So check it out and share widely! bit.ly/thedevouringmetaphor
April 16, 2025 at 11:54 AM
brownsmith.bsky.social
Check out the Trans Biblical Podcast for a new episode where I talk about my work on Mordecai as a non-binary character, and why this kind of biblical work is so necessary these days.

Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/n...

Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/7qU3...

Youtube: youtu.be/SA9k-T-LvOA
An advertising banner for "The Trans Biblical Podcast Episode 2," featuring "Nonbinary Characters in the Bible: Mordecai" with Dr. Esther Brownsmith. The images include a picture of the book and of Dr. Brownsmith
April 14, 2025 at 2:51 PM
brownsmith.bsky.social
It’s all shiny and real now!
Esther holds up a salmon-pink hardcover book titled “Unruly Books: Rethinking Ancient and Academic Imaginations of Religious Texts,” edited by Esther Brownsmith, Liv Ingeborg Lied, and Marianne Bjelland Kartzow.
January 30, 2025 at 8:35 PM
brownsmith.bsky.social
Our article about reading scripture as an interfaith group is out in Crosscultural Studies of Religion and Theology! Check out the whole issue to get a glimpse of what our Jewish-Christian Young Scholars Network has been doing. eplus.uni-salzburg.at/csrt/periodi...
An excerpt of text reading, Neither interfaith dialogue nor biblical exegesis can succeed when entered into from a perspective of single-minded and unshakeable superiority. Only through the process of engaging with other people and other ideas, in a context where they feel safe to express those ideas, can new insights emerge. This process, which requires patience and humility in abundance, is neither straightforward nor predictable, but it recognizes a deep truth reflected in the etymology of “philology”: that love, a profound connection between multiple entities, lies at the heart of the philological pursuit.
January 24, 2025 at 2:26 PM
brownsmith.bsky.social
Today marks the publication of Unruly Books: Rethinking Ancient and Academic Imaginations of Religious Texts, edited by myself, Liv Ingeborg Lied, and Marianne Bjelland Kartzow! We delve into "unruly books" of antiquity and what they tell us about how people have understood books—then and now.
The book cover, front and back, for "Unruly Books: Rethinking Ancient and Academic Imaginations of Religious Texts," edited by Esther Brownsmith, Liv Ingeborg Lied, and Marianne Bjelland Kartzow
January 23, 2025 at 3:19 PM
brownsmith.bsky.social
I finished mounting the mandala that I crocheted with hand spun Patagonian wool yarn that I bought from a lovely lady in Punta Arenas. It’s textured and symmetrical and cozy, over two feet across, with an eight-pointed Inanna star in gold, and I can’t wait to display it. (Terrible pic, sorry.)
A crochet mandala in gold and navy yarn fastened to a black hoop.
January 21, 2025 at 12:44 AM
brownsmith.bsky.social
Today I am thinking about kintsugi—the art of mending broken pottery with precious metals.

Things are broken right now. A lot of people are suffering, and a lot more will suffer in the days to come. I am especially holding space in my heart for trans and immigrant friends today. (1/2)
A shiny brown ceramic bowl mended with gold.
January 20, 2025 at 1:06 PM
brownsmith.bsky.social
Some words for this week from Nayyirah Waheed's collection "Salt."
A photo of a page of poetry that reads: fall apart. please just, fall apart. open your mouth. and hurt. hurt the size of everything it is — dam
November 8, 2024 at 2:30 PM
brownsmith.bsky.social
In honor of Veilguard releasing today, I made Frilly Orlesian Cakes! (Chocolate cake infused with apricot brandy, layered with apricot preserves, topped with dark chocolate ganache and a physalis berry.) H/t to @trickweekes.bsky.social for the recipe inspiration.
Four small chocolate cakes on lacy white paper.
October 31, 2024 at 10:30 PM
brownsmith.bsky.social
Great news: my latest article is live in Religion Compass! Check out "Metaphors Realized in Narrative: A New Direction for Biblical Metaphor" for an introduction to realized metaphor, the exciting central theoretical advance of my first book.
Link: compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Realized metaphor in the Bible still “has not received the attention it deserves.” Not only does it represent a productive approach for analyzing narrative passages, it also offers the possibility of examining the power dynamics that lie below the surface of the text. Metaphors represent, reify, and reinforce existing beliefs in a society. They are intelligible because they draw on preexisting assumptions and widespread experiences, but they concretize those assumptions and experiences into the narrative text, forcing the reader to accept them (if only provisionally) to understand the text's rhetorical force. — Esther Brownsmith, “Metaphors Realized in Narrative: A New Direction for Biblical Metaphor,” Religion Compass, Oct. 2024
October 8, 2024 at 5:11 PM
brownsmith.bsky.social
Proofs day is best day! This one's been in the pipeline for a while, so I'm very excited to see it nearing release.
A screenshot of a Wiley editorial screen for an article titled "Metaphors Realized in Narrative: A New Direction for Biblical Metaphor," due to be published in Religion Compass.
September 23, 2024 at 12:38 PM
brownsmith.bsky.social
Working on my Fancy Orlesian Cakes, inspired by @trickweekes.bsky.social ‘s description. The current round is a butter chocolate cake, apricot preserves, dark chocolate ganache flavored with Antivan liqueur (Cuarenta Y Tres), and a fresh raspberry. Need to add frilly papers and gold dust. #dragonage
A photo of two cake squares on a blue plate. The cakes are layered chocolate, topped with a fresh raspberry.
September 8, 2024 at 2:19 PM
brownsmith.bsky.social
There's something really wonderful about going through proofs and thinking, you know, these ideas are actually pretty darn good. Past-Esther might just have been onto something.

(Less obliquely: preorder our Unruly Books volume today! www.bloomsbury.com/us/unruly-bo...)
A page of text from an Introduction. It begins: “Unruly.” The word conjures images of rowdy students, of hair flying in every direction, of things that stubbornly refuse to submit to order. It is not a word that is ordinarily applied to staid, reliable books. But the books discussed in this volume are no ordinary books. Some of them do not exist in any extant form; we may not even know whether they ever existed. Others exist, but in unstable fashion, slippery zephyrs that resist a single form. Yet others are tainted by association: written by voices outside the mainstream, transformed by their links to marginal figures. They are, in short, unruly.
September 2, 2024 at 5:17 PM
brownsmith.bsky.social
Your last saved meme is your moral philosophy.
A monochrome letterblock print of two flowers with a quote in between. The quote says, “to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing — Raymond Williams.”
August 20, 2024 at 10:52 AM
brownsmith.bsky.social
Check out my latest article, available open access at @jibs-journal.bsky.social !
On the left, an oil painting depicts a beardless Black man in "oriental" clothing holding up a jeweled box. The right side is the following text: Eunuchs are precisely those who have a missing or defunct “hand”—specifically, a “hand” that is unable to procreate and produce offspring. This is no coincidence. Through its focus on the active hands of eunuchs, the book of Esther is making an argument about the royal world of its setting. ... In the book of Esther, power reproduces queerly, outside lines of biological lineage. —Esther Brownsmith, “Queer Futures and Phallic Humour in the Book of Esther” (access at bit.ly/jibs52)
July 8, 2024 at 12:26 PM
brownsmith.bsky.social
Coming this winter to an online academic bookseller near you!
A book cover by t&t clark. The title is "Unruly Books: Rethinking Ancient and Academic Imaginations of Religious Texts," edited by Esther Brownsmith, Liv Ingeborg Lied, and Marianne Bjelland Kartzow. The color scheme is salmon, with an image of a palimpsest wall mural, with various ancient Christian images overlapping and fragmenting.
June 7, 2024 at 1:06 PM
brownsmith.bsky.social
A monochrome tattoo of a five-pointed Mobius strip surrounding the Hebrew word “emet,” with leaves floating in a water surface in the background.
May 25, 2024 at 9:03 PM
brownsmith.bsky.social
It's heeeere! Join me on Zoom for the launch party on April 17, 4:30pm EST; register at bit.ly/BrownsmithBo....
A cardboard box with bubble wrap surrounding books with a green patterned cover and the title "Gendered Violence in Biblical Narrative: The Devouring Metaphor," by Esther Brownsmith.
April 2, 2024 at 2:02 PM
brownsmith.bsky.social
More hype for my upcoming book! The hybrid event will be on April 17 at 4:30pm EST, and registration for Zoom is now open at bit.ly/BrownsmithBo... . Please join me to chat about how metaphors of food underlie some of the Bible's grimmest stories.
A poster advertising a hybrid book launch for "Gendered Violence in Biblical Narrative: The Devouring Metaphor," by Esther Brownsmith, on April 17 at 4:30pm EST. Zoom registration is at https://bit.ly/BrownsmithBookLaunch
March 24, 2024 at 2:29 PM
brownsmith.bsky.social
Today’s realization: Tamar Biala’s wonderful modern midrash, “And Where Was Sarah,” is more or less literally an example of the Five Things fanfic trope. I might have to use it this fall.

(Did I mention that I’m teaching “Bible as Fan Fiction” this fall at U Dayton? Here’s the flyer.)
A flyer advertising the class “Bible as Fan Fiction,” with Dr. Esther Brownsmith, taught in fall 2024.
March 19, 2024 at 12:30 PM
brownsmith.bsky.social
I'm proud to be featured in the Dayton Daily News today, and sad that it was necessary to speak up against Ohio's transphobic regulations. Please share, and please contact the Department of Health by February 5.
A newspaper column in the Ideas & Voices section. The title is "Gender-affirming care bill based on unethical religious bias." The text of the article is online at https://www.daytondailynews.com/ideas-voices/voices-as-an-ohioan-and-a-christian-i-want-all-to-have-right-to-flourish-in-their-own-gender-identity/Z7CD3IBZCBABPDJBPW24PTVDCI/
January 25, 2024 at 12:24 PM