Emily Chesley researches and teaches on the social and religious history of the late antique Mediterranean, women and gender in the ancient world, and Syriac Christianity. During the 2024–2025 academic year, she is in residence in Washington, DC as a Junior Fellow in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks.

Her dissertation, “Women on the Edge: A Social History of Women in the Late Antique East, 5^th–8^th c.,” is a social history of lay women living in the borderlands between the Roman and Sasanian empires and, later, the Islamic caliphates in Syro-Mesopotamia during late antiquity.  Using Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources she analyzes the numerous precarities that women navigated in this world. This project brings a comparative lens to late antique women’s history, centering (dominantly rural) Syriac- and Arabic-speaking communities in the East rather than the Greek- and Latin-speaking West. Methodologically, Emily’s work draws upon a wide set of sources not usually read together—homilies and chronicles, imperial and ecclesiastical laws, hagiographies and inscriptions—to address questions of late antique social history.

Emily’s research has been supported by a Fulbright-Greece Turkey Joint Research Award; the named Charles W. Lummis Scholarship; the Dr. Jack Jallo and Mrs. Gage Johnston Fellowship in Digital Humanities at Beth Mardutho; a Seeger Hellenic Studies Award; a Graduate Research Award from the Center for Culture, Society, and Religion; and the Peter R. Brown Prize, among other awards.

Emily has published articles in Studia Patristica and Hugoye and written a guide to the Library of Congress’ microfilmed collection of manuscripts from Saint Catherine’s Monastery, the monasteries on Mount Athos, and the Greek and Armenian Patriarchates of Jerusalem. Her edited volume, Visual Culture in Medieval Syriac Traditions, will appear with DeGruyter Press in 2025. She currently serves on the English Literary Critics Committee for the Syriac-English Bible at Gorgias Press.

Emily is committed to bringing to life the world of late antiquity in the classroom.  She has completed the Teaching Transcript Program (Princeton’s pedagogy training certification) and the selective Teaching Ministry Program at Princeton Theological Seminary. At Princeton she has taught in the Departments of History and Religion and in the Humanities Council. She has volunteered at Beth Mardutho since 2018 leading a weekly seminar for its seminary interns, and in 2024 she co-taught a travel class for graduate students and scholars to the Syriac sites of southeastern Turkey. She also co-hosts a public history podcast on women in antiquity, Women Who Went Before.