Ashley M. Purpura
- Director // WGSS // LGBTQ // CDIS // SIS
- Associate Professor // Religious Studies // SIS
- Affiliated Faculty // Jewish Studies // SIS
- Affiliated Faculty // Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies // SIS
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Ashley Purpura researches and teaches about religion, and gender from a variety of perspectives. She specializes in the study of Orthodox Christianity especially in light of its Byzantine heritage. Her scholarship explores how sources, practices, figures, and values from within this tradition are engaged to address complex contemporary issues.
She is the author of Women in the Orthodox Tradition: Feminism, Theology, and Equality (University of Notre Dame Press, 2025) and God, Hierarchy, and Power: Orthodox Theologies of Authority from Byzantium, (Fordham University Press, 2018). She is also the co-editor of Orthodox Tradition and Human Sexuality (Fordham University Press, 2022) and Rethinking Gender in Orthodox Christianity (Wipf and Stock, 2023).
Purpura serves on the international expert committee of the “New Directions in Orthodox Christian Thought” project sponsored by the Oslo Coalition on Freedom of Religion or Belief, and is the co-editor of the "Orthodox Christianity and Contemporary Thought" book series at Fordham University Press. For 2024-2029, she has been appointed as a McDonald Senior Distinguished Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University.