Dr Sara Parvis (PhD)

Senior Lecturer in Patristics

Background

Sara's research interests within the Patristic period include the development of orthodoxy and the construction of heresy, sources of authority in the Church, the place of scriptural exegesis in Patristic thought, and the search for some of the hidden voices of early Christianity, both doctrinal and sociological.

Dr Sara Parvis was born in Aberdeen and grew up in Edinburgh.

She studied twice at undergraduate level at the University of Oxford (first in English and French at St Hilda's, later in Theology at Blackfriars), and then took a PhD at the University of Edinburgh.

She held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship from October 2002 until September 2005.

She is the author of Marcellus of Ancyra and the Lost Years of the Arian Controversy 325-345, a study of the often neglected period between Nicaea and the emergence of the theological stars of the later half of the Controversy.

Qualifications

PhD

Undergraduate teaching

Church history, thought and theology 100-787, East and West

Patristic Greek and Latin

History and theology of the High Middle Ages (particularly Thomas Aquinas and the Dominicans)

History of religious orders

Vatican II

Research summary

The Arian controversy

Marcellus of Ancyra

Patristic exegesis

Second-century Christianity

Asia Minor Christianity

Montanism

Early Canon Law

Her research interests within the Patristic period include the development of orthodoxy and the construction of heresy, sources of authority in the Church, the place of scriptural exegesis in Patristic thought, and the search for some of the hidden voices of early Christianity, both doctrinal and sociological.

She has also worked on early Christian models of the family as resources for a more nuanced modern theology of the family.

More information about research projects by Dr Parvis are available on her Edinburgh Research Explorer profile

Current research interests

She is currently completing an edition of Marcellus of Ancyra's extant works.

View all 14 publications on Research Explorer