Shaily Patel

Shaily Patel is an assistant professor of early Christianity in the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech. She earned her Ph.D. from The University of North Carolina in 2017 and holds master’s degrees from Vanderbilt Divinity School and The University of Chicago. Her love for the ACC began as an undergraduate at Wake Forest University and remains firmly intact.

Dr. Patel’s research explores the various, often contradictory ways in which so-called magic was used to advance a number of theological ends in early Christian texts. Rather than seeing magic solely as a way to malign the rituals and traditions of those external to formative Christianity, she aims to show that magic could be used for a variety of things, from enforcing social cohesion among budding communities, to generating conversion, to correcting the views of other Christian writers. Ancient Mediterranean magic was both dynamic and complex, and Dr. Patel hopes to similarly complicate modern understandings of ancient Christians and their texts in her current book project entitled Peter the Magician: Discourses of Magic in Early Petrine Traditions.

Dr. Patel’s teaching is likewise dedicated to complicating easy assertions about the past, and about past Christians in particular. She teaches courses in New Testament, Christian apocryphal texts, orthodoxy and heresy, and demonology and exorcism. In each of her courses, she emphasizes the variety of early Christian groups and their respective beliefs. She locates early Christians within their cultural contexts, demonstrating how these multiple Christianities converge with or diverge from their Graeco-Roman origins.