Brittany E. Wilson, assistant professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School, has received a 2016 sabbatical grant for researchers from The Louisville Institute to write a book exploring the question of Christian embodiment.

The Kentucky-based institute’s grant program assists research and writing projects that advance religious and theological scholarship in ways that also address practical issues of Christian faith and life, pastoral leadership, or religious institutions.

The grant will provide Wilson with $40,000 to assist in writing her book, The Embodied God: Corporeality in Acts and the Early Church, during the 2016-2017 academic year. Her project explores Christian embodiment by focusing on the New Testament book of Acts, the earliest narrative account of the birth and growth of the church.

Wilson’s book maintains that representations of embodiment in Acts not only generate later Christian discourse regarding the body, but point to Jesus, who according to Acts, is God in human flesh. By narrating the centrality of the body in the early church, Wilson articulates the church’s vision of a holistic Christian life and how corporeality connects to cornerstone tenets of the Christian faith.

Wilson is the author of Unmanly Men: Refigurations of Masculinity in Luke-Acts published by Oxford University Press in 2015 and winner of the 2016 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise. She has also published in journals such as New Testament Studies, the Journal of the Bible and its Reception, the Catholic Biblical Quarterly, and the Journal of Biblical Literature. Her research focuses on constructions of bodies, gender, and ethnicity in the Gospels and Acts, as well as early Christian accounts of suffering, persecution, and death.