Rhiannon Graybill researches and teaches about the Hebrew Bible. She is especially interested in feminist and queer approaches to biblical interpretation, and in reading contemporary literature with (and against) ancient biblical texts. Her first book, Are We Not Men?: Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets (Oxford University Press, 2016), explores the performance of masculinity by biblical prophets, including Moses, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. The book puts the biblical prophets in conversation with contemporary sources such as poetry, film, and gender theory to demonstrate that prophetic masculinity is queer masculinity. Her second book, Texts after Terror: Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible (Oxford University Press, 2021), focuses on rape and sexual violence in the Hebrew Bible. Drawing on feminist, queer, and affect theory, as well as activism against rape and rape culture, Texts after Terror offers a new framework for reading biblical rape stories. This framework critiques the reliance on a consent/nonconsent binary as a determinant of rape; rethinks sexual harm; reads biblical rape texts with contemporary survivor accounts; and advocates for a practice of “unhappy reading” that makes unhappiness and open-endedness into key feminist sites of possibility. The book also offers new readings of the rapes of Dinah, Tamar, Bathsheba, Hagar, Lot’s daughters, Daughter Zion, and the Levite’s concubine. Texts after Terror received the American Academy of Religion's 2022 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Textual Studies.
Graybill’s other major focus in recent years has been the book of Jonah. Together with John Kaltner and Steven L. McKenzie, she has recently completed a commentary on Jonah in the Anchor Yale Bible Commentaries series. Jonah: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary was published 2023. A key feature of the commentary is its emphasis on using contemporary methods to read the book of Jonah, including queer and affect theory, postcolonial criticism, and trauma theory. Along with the commentary, Graybill, Kaltner, and McKenzie have also recently completed a short introductory book, What Are They Saying about the Book of Jonah?, published by Paulist Press (2023).
Graybill’s current research project, This is Not My Beautiful Body, explores one of the richest — and, from a feminist view, most troubling — metaphorical complexes of the Hebrew Bible: the woman’s body as land and its equally familiar reversal, the land as woman. This project explores how we might read these bodies differently, especially when we read with and through speculative fiction, literary horror, and the feminist Weird. This is Not My Beautiful Body centers the weird female body, drawing on traditions of feminist literary and speculative fiction to think differently about female embodiment.
Graybill has also edited four volumes: Rape Culture and Religious Studies: Critical and Pedagogical Engagements, with M. Cooper Minister and Beatrice Lawrence (Lexington, 2019), The Bible, Gender, and Sexuality: Critical Readings, with Lynn R. Huber (Bloomsbury/T.&T. Clark, 2020), and “Who Knows What We’d Make of It, If We Ever Got Our Hands on It?”: The Bible and Margaret Atwood with Peter J. Sabo (Gorgias, 2021), and Lee Edelman and the Queer Study of Religion with Kent L. Brintnall and Linn Marie Tonstad (Routledge, 2023).The Atwood volume won the Margaret Atwood Society award for Best Edited Volume. Three additional edited volumes are in progress: Lee Edelman and the Queer Study of Religion, with Kent L. Brintnall and Linn Tonstad (under contract with Routledge), Ruth: Themes and Issues in Biblical Studies, with Philippe Guillaume (under contract with Equinox), and Narrating Rape: Lacunae and Shifting Perspectives in (Biblical) Literature and Popular Culture, with L. Juliana M. Claassens and Christl Maier.
Graybill is editor (with Robert L. Seesengood) of The Bible and Critical Theory, an internationally recognized journal, and has published numerous articles and book chapters on gender, sexuality, and the Hebrew Bible. She holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies, with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, from the University of California, Berkeley.
Rhiannon was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2010 – she was chosen in the Graduate Fellow category.