Personal Statement

An interest that has run throughout my career is the question of how people come to hold the religious beliefs that they do.  What makes us believe in God, or gods, or demons, or angels, or saints, or ghosts, or ifrits, or banshees or anything else?  In recent years, I've focused particularly on how narratives create and sustain such beliefs and how they help to underwrite the rituals that accompany belief.  My most recent scholarly book is The Story of Myth (2018), which uses approaches from folklore studies, narratology, media studies and the social sciences to better understand the ways in which myths, in the vivid forms in which they were narrated in ancient Greece, contributed to the creation and sustenance of belief in the ancient gods and heroes. My new book, Gods and Mortals: Ancient Greek Myths for Modern Readers (Princeton 2023) puts to use what I learned by writing The Story of Myth.  There, I aimed to retell Greek myths in a way that would engage modern audiences while nonetheless remaining true to ancient versions.  Check my personal website for virtual events connected with Gods and Mortals.

I'm now working on two projects.  One is a book that looks at the reasons that audiences since the 1830s have had a seemingly endless appetite for supernatural horror stories, with particular attention to the ways in which these stories fulfill some of the same functions as religions do—and especially to the ways in which they support or challenge belief in supernatural entities.  The other is a book that looks at the reasons that ancient myths still fascinate us.

Contrary to rumor, I am not retiring!

Books

Edited Volumes

Recent Articles

•"The Religious Affordance of Supernatural Horror Fiction,"  Numen 70 (2023) 113-137.

•"Here Lies Hecate: Poetry and Immortality in 2nd-Century Mesembria," Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 24 (2022) 305-18.

•"Ancient Greek Tales of the Afterlife," in David Saunders, ed., Underworld: Imagining the Afterlife in Ancient Greek Vase Painting (Getty Museum: 2021).

•"Theurgy," in Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic, ed. David T. Frankfurter (Brill 2019).

•“Many (Un)Happy Returns: Ancient Greek Concepts of a Return from Death and their Later Counterparts," in Round Trip to Hades in the Eastern Mediterranean Tradition, eds. Gunnel Ekroth and Ingela Nilsson (Brill 2018) 356-69.

Sarah Iles Johnston