Sarah Pearce


Sarah J. K. Pearce is Ian Karten Professor of History and Head of the School of Humanities at the University of Southampton. She is known in particular for her work on Jews in the Hellenistic world and the Roman Empire, especially the life and work of Philo of Alexandria.

Career

Pearce read Divinity at the University of London gaining her BA in 1988. She moved to the Oriental Institute of the University of Oxford and gained her D.Phil. in 1995 with a dissertation on the reception of the Bible in the Second Temple period. Her work was published in an expanded version in 2013 as The words of Moses: studies in the reception of Deuteronomy in the Second Temple Period.
Pearce moved to the University of Southampton in 1996 firstly as a Parkes Fellow and then as the first Ian Karten Fellow. She became lecturer, senior lecturer and then Professor of History. She is a member of the University of Southampton's Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations. Pearce was a co-director of the AHRB funded Greek Bible in the Graeco-Roman World Project with Tessa Rajak at the University of Reading. Pearce was a collaborator on the AHRC project based at the University of Oxford on The Reception of Josephus in Jewish Culture from the Eighteenth Century to the Present.
Pearce is working on a new English translation and commentary on Philo's On the Decalogue for the Philo of Alexandria Commentary Series.

Selected publications