Tracy Lemos
Professor, Women & Gender Studies and Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies
T. M. Lemos is a professor at the Women & Gender Studies Institute and the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies with wide-ranging interests and expertise. Trained in biblical studies, religion, and the ancient history of Israel/Palestine, her focus has turned in the past decade to the comparative history of violence while continuing to foreground issues of masculinity and women’s status.
Her second book, Violence and Personhood in Ancient Israel and Comparative Contexts, published by Oxford University Press in 2017, examines the intersections of hypermasculinity, dehumanizing violence, and personhood in ancient Israel, wider ancient West Asia, and the contemporary United States. She also co-edited the first volume of the Cambridge World History of Genocide (2023), authoring chapters on genocide in ancient Israel and ancient Mesopotamia. She is currently writing a book on healing from dehumanizing violence that examines how communities develop robust modes of responding to dehumanization that are both specific to the forms of violence deployed against them and reflect and draw inspiration from the responses of other dehumanized communities.
In addition to these works, Lemos has published articles on many different aspects of violence, focusing especially on constructions of gender, dehumanization, torture, sexualized violence, and the study of genocide in ancient and modern contexts. Many of her works have addressed violence in biblical texts and the relationship between violence and various aspects of what one might call “religion”— conceptions of the deity, ritual, purity and impurity, sacrifice, and hierarchy.
Lemos is also interested in the history of kinship and family. Her first book, published in 2010 with Cambridge University Press, explores connections between marriage customs, women’s status, and changes in kinship structures occurring in ancient Palestine over the course of a millennium. She has recently returned to the subject of family, beginning a collaborative project with Andrea S. Allen in the Department of Anthropology and the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies examining the development of new forms of kinship in queer communities in contemporary Canada and the United States.
She earned a PhD from Yale University.