BA, GradDipAppLing, GradDipEd, MA(BibStud), MLE, PhD(HebrewBible)

Dr Carolyn Alsen is an educator, linguist and researcher in education, religious and biblical studies, particularly Hebrew Bible/Old Testament.

Her pastoral and educational leadership experience is in university residential college and Christian parish-based pastoral work (Uniting Church), secondary religious education and English teaching and lecturing in biblical studies and linguistics in Australia and internationally. She currently works in the academic role of Learning Specialist; promoting, by strategy and application of public law, the quality of student learning experience in the University of Divinity.

Carolyn has conducted a grammar analysis with SIL with the Awad Bing, a language group in Papua New Guinea. She has also conducted a “Reading with” project alongside First Nations communities on Vancouver Island, while a research assistant at Trinity Western University, Canada. She has also worked on the translation of Syriac manuscripts as research assistant at the Centre for Biblical and Early Christian Studies, Australian Catholic University.

Her research interests include the gaze, Evil Eye and surveillance in the Hebrew Bible, Critical Theory and the Bible, biblical decolonizing and gender criticism, the book of Genesis and biblical Semitics. Essays include “Veiled Resistance: The Cognitive Dissonance of Vision in Genesis 38” in Imagined Worlds and Constructed Differences in the Hebrew Bible, Bloomsbury (2019); “Drones Over Sodom: Resisting the Fantasy of Security” in Ecological Aspects of War: Engagements with Biblical Texts, Bloomsbury (2017); “Staring Down the Violence: Surveillance in Genesis” Colloquium (2016); “Elements of Sentence Construction and Cohesion in Awad Bing.” in Papers on Six Languages of Papua New Guinea, ANU (2010). Her research in progress includes surveillance in the Bible and internalisation of the gaze in biblical interpretation. Carolyn has presented her research at the Society of Biblical Literature, St Andrews University, University of New South Wales, the Old Testament Society of Southern Africa and the Society of Asian Biblical Studies.

As Learning Specialist, Carolyn encourages the University’s commitment to academic quality and increased student experiences through providing support for the design and implementation of innovations and recommendations drawn from evidence-based analysis in three main areas: academic learning, student engagement and staff training.

Positions

• 

  Learning Specialist

  University of Divinity

External Affiliations

• Society of Biblical Literature (Member)
• ANZATS (Member)
• Fellowship for Biblical Studies (Melbourne) (Member)
• Victorian Institute of Teaching (Member)