Erika Tritle
Assistant Professor
Contact Erika Tritle
843-349-5008 etritle@coastal.eduPenny Hall 353
Fall 2023 Office Hours
Mondays/Wednesdays/Fridays 1:00 - 2:00pm
*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, PhD, grew up in Minnesota and South Dakota, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister and a public school teacher. 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 that 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. Dr. Tritle has published several articles in international journals on issues related to the conversos, or baptized Jews and their descendants, of late medieval Spain. She is awaiting the publication of her English translations of a fifteenth-century book-length Latin treatise and a Spanish diatribe that debate whether “Jewishness” and “Christianness” are qualities that can be inherited and become, in a sense, racial. From 2018 to the lockdown of 2020, Dr. Tritle, along with her husband and two children, lived in Israel while she 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. She has a growing interest in interfaith studies, religion in public life, and the ways we tell (religious) histories.
Education
Ph.D., University of Chicago Divinity School
M.A., University of Chicago Divinity School
B.A., Luther College
Interesting Facts
Dr. Tritle has worked as an AmeriCorps Vista Member in Monterey County, California; a substitute teacher for kids in pre-K through high school in California, South Dakota, and Georgia; and a resident manager of a Ronald McDonald House in Chicago. She has also studied nonviolence as a way of life in Paha Sapa (the Black Hills) and friendship across religions in Jerusalem.
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, death and dying, interfaith studies
Website: https://coastal.academia.edu/ErikaTritle