Whitley College is excited to announce that Professor Mark Brett will be the General Editor of Society of Biblical Literature’s Journal of Biblical Literature, effective 1 January 2019. Professor Brett will continue to lecture on the Hebrew Bible and Ethics at Whitley College next year.
The public announcement from John Kutsko, Executive Director of the Society of Biblical Literature, reads:
Professor Brett teaches Hebrew Bible at Whitley College in Melbourne, Australia, within the University of Divinity. He was raised in Papua New Guinea, which has yielded a lifelong interest in the cultural contexts of education and biblical studies. His PhD on hermeneutical philosophy was published as Biblical Criticism in Crisis? The Impact of the Canonical Approach on Old Testament Studies (Cambridge University Press, 1991). His subsequent research has focused on ethnicity and postcolonial studies, and during 2005–2008 he also worked for an Aboriginal organization in developing new frameworks for the negotiation of native title claims within the state of Victoria. He served on the editorial boards of several journals, including five years (1992–1996) as an executive editor of the interdisciplinary journal Biblical Interpretation.
Among many other works, he is the author of Genesis: Procreation and the Politics of Identity(Routledge, 2000), Decolonizing God: The Bible in the Tides of Empire (Sheffield Phoenix, 2008), and Political Trauma and Healing: Biblical Ethics for a Postcolonial World (Eerdmans, 2016), editor of Ethnicity and the Bible (Brill, 1996), and coeditor of The Politics of the Ancestors: Exegetical and Historical Perspectives on Genesis 12–36 (Mohr Siebeck, forthcoming). He is currently writing a book on the political theologies of the Hebrew Bible.
As Professor Reinhartz noted in her announcement of this news to the forty members of the JBLeditorial board, “Mark has considerable editorial experience, and I am confident that he will make an excellent General Editor.” The Committee agrees wholeheartedly but also observes that Adele has set the bar high for any General Editor who follows. During the seven years of her editorship, she expanded JBL’s offerings in significant ways, such as the inclusion of biblical scholarship from more diverse communities and methodologies and the development of the JBL Forum, which promotes dialogue among diverse scholars around topics of current interest.
The twenty-eighth General Editor in JBL’s 137-year history, Brett will be the first non–North American to serve in this position. His appointment further signals JBL’s ongoing commitment to include perspectives from around the globe in the flagship journal in the field.
Research and Publications Committee
M. Patrick Graham, Chair
Jennifer Koosed
Marvin A. Sweeney
Thomas Thatcher
Yak-hwee Tan
Adele Reinhartz, Ex Officio
Jan G. van der Watt, Ex Officio
Bob Buller, Director of SBL Press
John F. Kutsko, Executive Director