OPEN KEYNOTE BY PROF. Elisa Uusimäki

Warmly welcome to the open keynote by Prof. Elisa Uusimäki (Aarhus University) on

Hidden or homebound? In Search of the Bible’s Female Travellers

on Wednesday June 11, 2025, at 11.00-12.30 in Auditorium Aava A152, Arcanum, Arcanuminkuja 1, Åbo/Turku.

The keynote is part of the conference Religion: Concealed and Revealed organized by Centre for the Study of Christian Cultures (CSCC), Donner Institute for Research in Religion and Culture (DI) and Polin Institute for Theological Research.

Abstract

Since antiquity, women have often been associated with sessility and domestic spaces, while a great deal of famous travellers have been men. Women have always been on the move, however, even if cultural expectations and divisions of labour have shaped patterns of human mobility in gendered ways. The same applies to the women of the biblical tradition, even though the Bible has been ignored in discussions of ancient travel literature. In this presentation, I seek to rethink our view of travel history by investigating women’s movement in antiquity based on its literary representations in the Bible and cognate texts. I argue that the extant sources reveal a surprising range of women on the move. Although they do not provide us with direct access to socio-historical realities in the ancient world, they do serve as valuable documents of cultural history, preserving a wealth of ancient social and cultural imaginaries of female mobility.

Bio

Elisa Uusimäki (PhD, University of Helsinki 2013; dr.theol., Aarhus University 2022) serves as professor of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies and as the Principal Investigator of the ERC funded project “An Intersectional Analysis of Ancient Jewish Travel Narratives” (2021–2026) at Aarhus University, Denmark. Uusimäki studies the literary and cultural history of Judaism in antiquity, working across the corpora of the Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, Dead Sea Scrolls, Pseudepigrapha, and the works of Philo of Alexandria and Flavius Josephus. In addition to her current research on travel and mobility, she has published on topics such as early Jewish wisdom literature, lived ancient religion, gender and intersectionality, cultural interaction in the ancient world, and manuscript studies.