Susan Holman

Susan Holman is a senior research professor in Christ College. Prior to the Fall 2024 semester, she served as the John R. Eckrich Chair and Professor of Religion and the Healing Arts. She received undergraduate degrees from Concordia College, Bronxville, and Valparaiso University, and graduate degrees from the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy (M.S.), Harvard Divinity School (M.T.S.) and Brown (Ph.D.). While working as a registered dietitian for low-income families in Boston, encounters with early Christian writers called her out of the clinic into theological studies on the history of illness, poverty, and social welfare in late antiquity. For more than twenty years she wrote and edited for the Harvard medical and public health communities while concurrently also serving as a scholar, editor, and translator on related themes in early Christian history. She was an invited researcher and consultant at the Institute for Advanced Study at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium), and the University of Virginia’s Project on Lived Theology, and served on the Board of Directors for the Pappas Patristic Institute at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, and currently ReMeDHe, an international working group on religion, medicine, disability, and health in late antiquity. Her 2009 book, God Knows There’s Need: Christian Responses to Poverty, received funding from the Lilly Foundation and the Louisville Institute, and her 2015 book, Beholden: Religion, Global Health, and Human Rights, received the 2016 Grawemeyer Award in Religion. Her current projects explore intersections of religion and health in history, cross-generational voices, and material culture. Professor Holman enjoys hiking in all weathers, urban public transport, and quiet simplicity with media turned off. She is a member of the Tertiary Order of the Holy Paraclete, a global network of ordinary lay Christians inspired by the seventh-century English monastic, Hilda of Whitby.

Publications

The Garb of Being: Embodiment and the Pursuit of Holiness in Late Ancient Christianity
Fordham University Press, in press (2019)
Co-edited with Georgia Frank and Andrew S. Jacobs

Beholden: Religion, Global Health, and Human Rights
Oxford University Press, 2015
Winner of the 2016 Grawemeyer Award in Religion

On Fasting and Feasts: Saint Basil the Great
St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2013
Co-editor and translator with Mark DelCogliano

God Knows There’s Need: Christian Responses to Poverty
Oxford University Press, 2009

Wealth and Poverty in Early Church and Society
BakerAcademic with Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2008
Editor, with 17 other contributors

The Hungry are Dying: Beggars and Bishops in Roman Cappadocia
Oxford University Press, 2001

Essentials of Nutrition for the Health Professions
J. B. Lippincott Co., 1987