I hope my work transforms how we think about ourselves, the world, and our relationship with the Bible.
Just So You Know a Little About Me
Trained as a scholar of literature within the humanities, I focus on the Bible: on the social-cultural world that produced it and, on its interpretation, and use in various modern contexts, both religious and otherwise.
My concern lies with questions of power and politics in the Hebrew Bible and its receptions. I began my doctoral work examining exile and the forces (empire, warfare, and geopolitics) that sustain it, and extended this inquiry to the dynamics of migration, displacement, and diaspora in ANE and contemporary contexts.
In the third year of doctoral study, my interest narrowed into questions of epistemic power and politics within exilic contexts, asking, for example, what counts as knowledge, how it is produced, who gets to know, and whose knowledge gets erased in contested spaces controlled by imperial power. I’m currently nerding out on a dissertation tentatively titled, The Politics of Knowledge in MT Daniel, which also draws comparisons with postcolonial discourses on knowledge.
Of course, as a Ghanaian, I often draw from Africa’s knowledge banks. On that front, I am interested in colonization as depicted in African literature, and all its intersections with the production of knowledge, its impact on identity, public religious imagination, and decolonial discourses broadly.
Before and during some of my academic training, I worked for many years as a “Pastor” (not formally ordained yet, but in the capacity of), and that experience influences a good bit of the aims of my scholarship.
Some Works
Published Work
“Hiding in Exile: Rereading Esther’s Identity and Assessing its Missional Implications for Africans in the Diaspora in Light of Homi Bhabha’s hybridity Theory”, Journal of African Christian Thought, a publication by Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology of Mission, Ghana. Vol. 25. No. December 2022
Soon to be Published
Select Presentations
“Daniel as an Epistemic Trickster – Knowledge, Performance, and Power in Daniel 2.” Presented at SBL Conference, 2024.
“Enforcing Holiness through legislation: boundary-making and belonging in the Temple scroll.” Presented at Yale Divinity School, 2023.
“Hiding in Exile: Reading Esther’s Identity.” Presented at Columbia Hebrew Bible Conference, Union Theological Seminary, New York, 2024.
Some Fellowships and Awards
- Yale MacMillan Center Pre-Dissertation Fellowship (2023)
- Yale RITM Fellowship (2022-2023)
- James L. Waits International Scholarship (2020-2022)
- Best Seminarian Award, Presbytery of Greater Atlanta (2019-2020)
Public Engagement
Co-host, First Reading Podcast
First Reading offers exegetical resources for the Old Testament Lectionary reading each week. Dr. Rachel Wrenn is Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies at Trinity Lutheran Seminary (Capital University), Rosy Kandathil is a PhD candidate in Hebrew Bible at Emory University, Tim McNinch is Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible at Christian Theological Seminary, and Paul Essah is a PhD student in Hebrew Bible at Yale University. In addition to short weekly episodes, they periodically invite a leading Hebrew Bible scholar for a longer conversation about the nitty-gritty of the week’s text.
Host, The Very Basics Pod
Witty reflections about the Bible, faith, contemporary African society, and everything else in between. Thanks for hanging around!