Kimberley C. Patton

Professor of the Comparative and Historical Study of Religion

On Leave

Spring 2024

Education

AB, Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges
AM, PhD, Harvard University

Profile

Kimberley C. Patton specializes in ancient Greek religion and archaeology, with research interests in material religion, iconography, sacrifice, ancient religion and healing, and the ecology of Mediterranean sanctuaries. She also teaches and publishes in the history of world religions, particularly ritual studies, animal studies, religion, myth and the natural world, sacred art, aniconism and iconoclasm, dreams and dream interpretation, lamentation and weeping, religious laughter, angels and angelology, twins and twinship, childbirth and motherhood, and funerary cult. She is involved in the ongoing discussion in the academy of the goals, methods, and value of comparative study. She is deeply committed to the growth of Native American and indigenous studies in the study of religion, and to indigenous representation in scholarship and teaching in higher education.

Her book Religion of the Gods: Ritual, Paradox, and Reflexivity (Oxford, 2009), won the 2010 American Academy of Religion Book Award for Excellence in Religious Studies in the Analytical-Descriptive category. She is also the author of The Sea Can Wash Away All Evils: Modern Marine Pollution and the Ancient Cathartic Ocean (Columbia, 2006). Patton’s research on the ritual dimensions of maternal mortality in a Neolithic burial at the site of Çatalhöyük in Central Anatolia, Turkey was published as a chapter co-authored with forensic archaeologist Lori Hager in Religion in the Organization and Transformation of a Neolithic Society: Vital Matters, ed. Ian Hodder (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Out of this work has grown a wider monograph in progress, Our Mothers’ Bones: Religion, Childbirth, and the Myth of Unique Identity, forthcoming in 2024 (Bloomsbury Academic).

Cover of Kim Patton book Gemini She is editor of, and contributing author to, four other books: with Benjamin Ray, A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age (University of California Press, 2000); with John Stratton Hawley, Holy Tears: Weeping in the Religious Imagination (Princeton, 2005); with Paul Waldau, A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics (Columbia, 2006), and (as sole editor and as a contributing author), Gemini and the Sacred: Twins and Twinship in Religion and Mythology (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). With Francis X. Clooney and Kurt A. Richardson, she is co-editor of and contributing author to a volume on the comparative theme of messianism, entitled The One Awaited: Figuring the Messianic in World Religions (forthcoming, Columbia University Press, 2024)

In the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Patton serves as a member of the Committee on Degrees in Folklore and Mythology, the Standing Committee on Archaeology, and the joint FAS/HDS Standing Committee on the Study of Religion.