Kelly Holob
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kholob.bsky.social
Kelly Holob
@kholob.bsky.social
840 followers 380 following 230 posts
Fellowships Advisor | PhD in Early Christian Studies | she/her
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kholob.bsky.social
This won’t come as much of a surprise, but it’s now clear that any source of funding tied to the State Department will almost certainly not fund projects related to queer/trans people.
Below are examples of Fiscal Year 2024 grant abstracts from the IFLE Fulbright-Hays Programs. These abstracts demonstrate that these grant programs have deviated from the core mission of supporting international education for global competitiveness: • $37,000 was awarded to a doctoral student for a dissertation project on the relationship between collective movement, like boxing, walking, and dancing, and systemic conditions of anti-trans violence. The student proposed traveling to Bogota, Columbia’s red-light district and comparing experiences there with a boxing club meeting in Los Angeles’s Macarthur Park. • $27,000 was awarded to a doctoral student to investigate non-binary and trans francophones’ linguistic attitudes and ideologies towards inclusive French in Montreal, Canada. • Over $72,000 was awarded to a doctoral student for a dissertation on the Queer and Trans Community Building in Czechia and Slovakia. The funding would allow the student to travel and “create an interactive map of Czechia and Slovakia online, similar to Queering the Map.” • A doctoral student was awarded over $20,000 for a dissertation on transgender surgery in Taiwan. • Lastly, a grant awardee requested over $34,000 to complete a project to examine how queer and transgender Thai Buddhist artists in Bangkok, Thailand and Berlin, Germany are re-shaping contemporary Thai Buddhism. ED and State commit to utilizing available statutory authorities to promote innovation and system integration in pursuit of better outcomes for program participants by establishing a partnership that (1) streamlines agency policies and programmatic requirements; (2) provides process improvements to enhance the experience for program participants; (3) restructures and consolidates international education programs; and (4) connects ED education programs with State’s international education expertise to create coordinated Fulbright grant and international education programs.
November 19, 2025 at 4:19 PM
kholob.bsky.social
Finally hung up this very cool sculpture by @oddoblivion.bsky.social that reminds me of my dissertation topic
Small wall-mounted sculpture with three skeletal figures in robes with halos with skulls at their feet in an ornate oval frame. Painting makes it look distressed and old.
August 8, 2025 at 4:32 PM
kholob.bsky.social
Thank you to @logeiongklat.bsky.social for making translation in a power outage possible
Two sheets of Greek on a desk, along with a lit candle.
July 25, 2025 at 12:14 AM
kholob.bsky.social
I love the things I find through my job
A fellowships database entry: potato leadership, education and advancement foundation (potato LEAF) graduate scholarship, which is for graduate research that will benefit the potato industry
May 27, 2025 at 5:54 PM
kholob.bsky.social
On Saturday at NAPS I’ll be talking about why ancient doctors and magicians used the body parts of executed people for treatments, amulets, and curses. Don’t miss out if you like deeply unpleasant things first thing in the morning!
A medieval illustration of a skeleton holding some sort of object in its hand interacting with a doctor in robes holding a bottle.
May 22, 2025 at 11:04 PM
kholob.bsky.social
Glad NAPS isn’t this weekend
Screenshot of Carrot weather app. Chicago is 89 degrees F or 32 C and feels like 102. There is also a tornado watch and one other weather alert.
May 15, 2025 at 11:54 PM
kholob.bsky.social
Some incredible messages left in my new office (yes, it was really written by the CIA)
Close up of a whiteboard. In purple marker, it reads “thank you Monica ❤️ the CIA”
January 15, 2025 at 11:34 PM
kholob.bsky.social
Bye, dissertation books
A pile about 70 library books arranged in 3 columns on top of a bench
January 5, 2025 at 8:08 PM
kholob.bsky.social
My defense is this Friday! If you’ve been interested in my work on how ghosts can tell us about how Christians reproduced a dehumanizing penal ideology (i.e., asserted there is a class of people who deserve to die) feel free to join. Send me a message if you’d like a link.
An image advertising Kelly Holob’s dissertation defense on December 6 at 10:30. If you’re interested in attending, contact me and I’ll send you the link. The abstract reads: My dissertation complicates and opens new avenues of research on early Christian martyrdom by arguing that the concept of the martyr as an innocent figure who does not deserve to die is dependent on the figure of the guilty criminal who does deserve to die. The first part examines the importance of aesthetics in Roman discourses of justice and how Christians reproduced this in their martyr texts. Criminals were compared or equated with allegedly sub-human creatures who were publicly punished or exploited for spectacle, including slaves and animals. Criminalized Christians were painted with the same brush, but when Christians wrote narratives about martyrs, such as the Martyrs of Lyon, they generally worked to separate martyrs, those who do not deserve to die, from associations with criminals, despite Jesus’s and martyrs’ designation of criminal by authorities. Against negative portrayals of condemned criminals, martyrs were asserted to be pure, beautiful despite tortures, hyper-rational, and human in a way criminals lacked. The second part shows that Christians were also invested in distinguishing dead martyrs from the ghosts of criminals. Biothanatoi, ghosts of the violently dead, often executed criminals, were a feared type of ghosts whose body parts were used in magic, magic that often understood them as suitable for enslavement and punishment. Executed martyrs were thought to be examples of these ghosts, a subject worthy of reproach for critics of Christianity and a concerning misunderstanding or misrepresentation for many Christians. Those critical of Christianity, such as Eunapius and Julian, would rhetorically heighten their criminality, whereas Christian apologists, such as John Chrysostom and Tertullian, would defend martyrs by emphasizing their innocence and exaggerating the guilt of…
December 3, 2024 at 3:37 PM
kholob.bsky.social
wow cool i hate this
A call for applications for a class to learn how to teach using LLMs in the liberal arts
November 19, 2024 at 7:46 PM
kholob.bsky.social
I’ve finally sent all 254 pages on my dissertation off to my committee
A screenshot of a Word document reading: It is easy to dismiss such accounts as folk behaviors that say little about religion. Jesus did not murder anyone; a petty thief is a problem, not a saint; martyrs did not deserve to die. This division into deserved and undeserved death is reminiscent of Tertullian's statement that executions "are not violent deaths, since Justice, the punisher of violence, decrees them (An. 56.8)." However, to quote Chicago defense attorney Clarence Darrow, "Even could violence ever prevent crime, the brutality, suffering, blood and crime of the rulers has towered mountain high above that of the weak and obscure victims whose wrongs they have pretended to avenge. And this cruelty does not abate." Through approving of judicial violence and through repeating animalized descriptions of criminals, Christians, even unintentionally, caused further violence against the condemned and those who looked like them. The dehumanization of the condemned by early Christians was not an inevitability but emerged from choices to distance themselves from the very sorts of people alongside whom Christ died.
November 15, 2024 at 5:26 PM
kholob.bsky.social
Went to Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary a couple weeks ago. Such a nice part of the city!
A photo of dry plants with Lake Michigan and the Chicago skyline in the background A photo of a stone staircase with fall foliage around it Close up photo of a purple berry plant Photo of a path with fall foliage on either side
November 14, 2024 at 4:45 PM
kholob.bsky.social
Always nice to see something like this in chapter feedback!
Screenshot of MS comment that reads this is fantastic in all caps.
April 24, 2024 at 7:09 PM
kholob.bsky.social
My first article is out today in Apocrypha 33!

Magical Procedures and Voces Magicae in the Acts and Martyrdom of Philip (APh II.18 and APh Mart 26)
The Acts of Philip and his Martyrdom both contain passages in which the apostle utters pseudo- Hebrew words and causes the earth to swallow his foes. Reading these narratives alongside paraliterary sources heuristically categorized as magical, such as Greek and Egyptian magical papyri and curse tablets, this paper argues that these strange words can usefully be identified as voces magicae, and that Philip’s attendant actions are both presented as seeming magical by the narrative and are likely read as magical in the texts’ reception. This paper also shows how fruitful it is to bring such sources to bear on the study of apocrypha and further encourages interdisciplinary scholarship. Because there is a close kinship between parts of the Acts of Philip and ancient magical texts, this paper also supplies a starting place for scholars of magic trained in classics and papyrology to mine apocryphal sources and understand how magical language is taken up and understood by anc Screenshot of second page of article
December 1, 2023 at 4:32 PM
kholob.bsky.social
If you want to hear about ghosts, magic, criminals, and Lazarus, come see my talk at the violence panel, starting at 4 👻
Talk info. CC-008A at 4:25.
November 18, 2023 at 2:28 PM