dr. Silvia Castelli

Assistant Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Religious Sources

Personal information

I am a Senior Assistant Professor (Universitair Docent 1) of New Testament and Early Judaism, with a focus on the history of New Testament textual criticism and Jewish literature in Greek.

I am a member of The Society for New Testament Studies (SNTS), the Dutch Society of New Testament Studies (SNTC), the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), and the European (EAJS), Dutch (NGJS), and Italian (AISG) Associations for Jewish Studies.

I served in the Editorial Board of the journal Henoch (2012-2023) and in the Advisory Board of the journal Materia Giudaica (2024-).

At the School of Religion and Theology of the VU Amsterdam, I am a member of the Steering Committee of the teams New Testament and Christian Origins and Contextual Biblical Interpretation, and I serve as a member of the PhD Proposal Advisory Committee (PPAC).

Education

I studied Classical Studies at the University of Pavia in Italy and earned my first PhD in Jewish Studies from the University of Turin, under the supervision of Bruno Chiesa and Lucio Troiani, with a dissertation on Josephus’s interpretation of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers.

I have been a Fellow of the Institut für Europäische Geschichte (now Leibnitz Institute for European History) in Mainz for 18 months, and a one-year post-doc Lady Davis Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During my first PhD I also spent a three-months research stay at Yale University.

In 2010 I moved to the Netherlands to join the NWO project New Testament Conjectural Emendation: A Comprehensive Enquiry (VU Amsterdam 2010-2016). I collaborated to the Amsterdam Dababase of New Testament Conjectural Emendation, an important work in the field of NT textual criticism, and after a necessary career break, in 2019 defended my second PhD dissertation on the history of the criteria for evaluating variant readings, under the supervision of Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte and Jan Krans. It was published in Brill's NTTSD series in 2020 (see here).

Research

In the area of New Testament studies, I work on the history of New Testament textual criticism, with a focus on the history of methodology (e.g., conjectural emendation, criteria for evaluating readings, text types).

In the field of Early Judaism, I have written extensively on Josephus’ text, biblical interpretation, narrative, and reception, but also on Philo of Alexandria, the Septuagint, and the Greco-Roman context of first-century Judaism.

A firm believer in interdisciplinary research and team science, I worked from 2020 to 2022 in the 'Theory and Methods' Work Package of the project Anchoring Innovation (Dutch National Research School in Classical Studies) at Leiden University, bringing together scholars from all the work packages of the project to examine the role of agency in innovation, from antiquity to the Early Modern period. The volume resulting from that research was published by Brill in 2023 and is available Open Access (see here).

I am the initiator and (co)-chair (with Peter-Ben Smit) of the SBL Annual Meeting new program unit Biblical Studies and Spiritual Care: Intersections of Pastoral Practice and Biblical Hermeneutics (2024–2026). The unit has a sustained cooperation with the AAR unit Innovations in Chaplaincy and Spiritual Care. A volume on Biblical Interpretation and Spiritual Care in the Context of Healthcare has been submitted, and a second volume on the carceral context is in preparation. Several impact initiatives are connected to this research, and please feel free to contact me if you are interested in this research line.

For an updated overview of my publications, see my Research output.

Teaching

My teaching history includes courses at all academic levels. At the University of Trento, Italy (2004-2009) I have been teaching the following courses of Greek and Roman History open to third year BA as well as MA students: Ancient Greek historiography of the Near-East: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Phoenicia, Palestine; Ancient Judaism from a Greek perspective; Diaspora: Jewish Interaction in the Greco-Roman World; Ancient Greek Religion: An Introduction; Ancient Greek divination; Early Christianity in the Roman empire; Roman Palestine: A Geographic and Archaeological Approach; Anti-Semitism in ancient Rome? Problem and Sources; Ancient Roman Religion: An Introduction; The Jewish Community of Ancient Rome.

At Leiden University (2021-22 and 2023-24), I have been teaching the (Res)MA course Shem in the Tents of Japhet: Exploring Cultural Negotiation in Greco-Roman Jewish-Greek Literature.

In 2022 I have been a Visiting Professor at the University of Pavia, where I taught the MA course History of Judaism in the Roman Age.

At VU, I am the coordinator of the BA Greek courses (Greek I-II-III), I teach myself Greek II and III, and I am responsible for the Reading group NT Greek, specifically aimed to PhD students, but open to other students as well.

Supervision

I am currently (co-)supervising three PhD students: Marie-Josée Fortin, working on composite citations in the NT, Ramy Shenouda, working on the Samaritans in the NT, and Henk Veldhuijzen, working on Hebrews 13.

I enjoy the supervision activity and welcome PhD students in the area of Early Judaism, Greco-Roman and Jewish backgrounds of the NT, Research Method of the NT, Textual History of the Greek New Testament, and the intersection of Biblical Studies and Spiritual Care.

Ancillary activities

No ancillary activities

Ancillary activities are updated daily