Maria Doerfler

Maria Doerfler is a Professor (Adjunct) of Law at Yale Law School and an Assistant Professor of Late Antiquity at Yale University’s Department of Religious Studies. From 2013–2016, she was Assistant Professor of the History of Christianity at Duke Divinity School, where she was also an Associate Member of the Graduate Program in Religion and the Center for Jewish Studies. Doerfler was previously Director of Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Center for Late Ancient Studies. She has received fellowships at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, the Institute for the Study of the Late Ancient World, and Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. Her 2020 book, Jephthah’s Daughter, Sarah’s Son: The Death of Children in Late Antiquity, received the American Academy of Religion’s Award for Best First Book in the History of Religions. Doerfler is a 1999 graduate of Princeton University and a 2002 graduate of UCLA School of Law. She earned a Ph.D. from Duke University, where she held a number of research fellowships, in 2013. Doerfler has recently completed a monograph on the intersection of writing law and creating sacred narratives.