Erika Tritle

Contact Erika Tritle

843-349-5008 etritle@coastal.edu

AOC2 341

Spring 2023 Office Hours
Mondays/Wednesdays/Fridays 10:00 - 11:00am
*Please email for an appointment.  

I suspect...that much human violence is generated simply by resisting the fuzziness of our own categories of sociocultural division." --Daniel Boyarin

Biography

Erika Tritle grew up in Minnesota and South Dakota, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister and a public school teacher and the younger sister of two brothers who coached her soccer teams and carried her by her ankles. She found herself both participating in church life and observing it. And then she found herself wondering about Jews, and Muslims, and so on. She encountered medieval Christianity in graduate school and combined that with her interest in Spain and in the way Christians construct themselves against Jews to write her dissertation, To the Jew First and to the Greek: Alonso de Cartagena and the Problem of Jewish Flesh in Fifteenth-Century Spain. Her husband and their two children showed the ultimate support by accompanying her for almost 19 months in Israel where Dr. Tritle served a Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship with the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. Prior to that, Dr. Tritle taught courses in history, religious studies, ethics, and interdisciplinary studies at South Dakota State University.

Education

Ph.D., University of Chicago Divinity School (2015)
M.A., University of Chicago Divinity School (2005)
B.A., Luther College (1999)

Interesting Facts

Selected publications:

“Anti-Judaism and a Hermeneutic of the Flesh: A Converso Debate in Fifteenth-Century Spain,” Church History and Religious Culture 95:2-3: 182-202 (2015)

“A Jewish Solution to the Problem of Excessive Christian Virility in the War against Spanish Islam,” in Crusading and Masculinities, Natasha Hodgson, Katherine J. Lewis, and Matthew Mesley eds. Crusades – Subsidia 13. London: Routledge (March): 256-271 (2019)

“Many Rivers, One Sea, and the Dry Land: Jews and Conversos in the Political Theology of Alonso de Cartagena,” Cadernos de Estudos Sefarditas 20:1 (May): 35-53 (2019)

Teaching Areas

Christianity (history, theology, practice, New Testament), world religions, theory and method in the study of religion, religion in public life

Research Areas

History of Christianity, Christian anti-Judaism, race in Christian thought, conversos in late medieval Spain, interfaith dialogue

Website: https://coastal.academia.edu/ErikaTritle