Sarah Parkhouse

I am a historian of religion, focusing on the ancient Mediterranean and the emergence of Christianity within the Greco-Roman-Egyptian context.

I am currently researching two projects:

1. Coptic Apocrypha, Lived Religion, and the Egyptian Landscape, funded by a British Academy postdoctoral fellowship. To find out more about this project see https://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/interview-with-dr-sarah-parkhouse/

In addition to the major grant, I have also been awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme small research grant for a collaborative project on "Lived Religion in Late Antique Egypt: Bodies, Objects, Places" (2024–25).

2. Amphitheatres, Space, and Religious Practices. I am interested in exploring how ancient and modern people have conceptualised amphitheatre spaces and the events held within them, particularly in religious terms. I have two forthcoming articles on this topic (see below), one which was awarded the Diamond Award for Integrative Scholarship.

I am a co-editor of a new book series, Coptic Gospels and Associated Texts, with volumes forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, and I serve on the editorial board of the Elements Early Christian Literature series. 

I have published and continue to work on gospel literature, canonical and non-canonical, gender, papyrology, and martyrdom. Past research projects have focused on the diversity of literature within early Christianity, and I have published on the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of John, the First Apocalypse of James, the martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicity, the Acts of Paul and Thecla, and the Pistis Sophia. My first book Eschatology and the Saviour: The Gospel of Mary among Early Christian Dialogue Gospels (Cambridge University Press, 2018) was awarded the Manfred Lautenschläger award for interdisciplinary religious studies.

My more general research interests are ancient religion, lived religion, place and landscape, objects, practices, ritual, magic, and comparative religion.

Before starting the British Academy fellowship, I was a research fellow at Australian Catholic University, Melbourne (2017-2020), and held a short-term fellowship at the Warburg Institute, London. I completed a AHRC-funded PhD at the University of Durham in 2017.