BA, MA, MPhil
Christine Rosa de Freitas is a second-year DPhil student at St. Cross College under the supervision of Professor Hindy Najman. She completed an MPhil in Theology at Oriel College, having previously completed an MA in Bible and the Ancient Near East at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a BA in Biblical and Theological Studies from Nyack College, USA.
Christine’s doctoral research focus is the Hodayot, a collection of Hebrew liturgical poems from the Dead Sea Scrolls. She is interested in how metaphors for spiritual transformation are used in the compositions and how transformation is hermeneutically conceptualized through them. The work engages with current scholarship on philological hermeneutics and textual pluriformity, bringing the Biblical corpus to bear on the theological themes developed in the Hodayot. She has presented her work at four different conferences in the past year and has had her doctoral dissertation project, “Birth and Metaphor: Hermeneutics of Transformation in the Hodayot,” approved by succeeding in her Transfer of Status interview.