dr. E.S. Marteijn
Elizabeth Marteijn is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Protestant Theological University. She is specialised in the study of modern Middle Eastern Christianity, with a focus on Palestine, Israel, and Lebanon.
She studied theology and anthropology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Protestant Theological University, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Edinburgh. She earned her PhD in World Christianity from the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh in 2022. She previously held postdoctoral appointments at the University of Groningen’s Department of Middle Eastern Studies and at the Faculty of Protestant Theology of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
She is currently completing a book project titled Palestinian Christianity in the 20th and 21st Centuries: Between Tradition and Transformation (under contract with Edinburgh University Press). This book examines developments in Christian thought and practice in late-modern and contemporary Palestine, demonstrating how profound historical changes in the Middle East have generated socio-political transformations in Palestinian Christianity. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic case studies, the book reveals how Palestinian Christians have navigated shifting political realities.
In addition, she is leading a new research project funded by a prestigious Veni Grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO), titled Rituals in Flux: Diasporic Religion among Christian Palestinian Refugees, 1948–present. This study traces the formation and transnational connections of Christian Palestinian refugee communities, and explores how religious thought and practice are shaped by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and by experiences of forced displacement, both locally and in diaspora.
Her scholarship has been published in the Jerusalem Quarterly, Islamochristiana, Exchange: Journal of Contemporary Christianities in Context, The Journal of World Christianity, and Studies in World Christianity, as well as in edited volumes published by Routledge and Rowman & Littlefield, among others. She was awarded a Leigh Douglas Memorial Prize from the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) for her PhD dissertation and has held fellowships at Yale University and Eastern University.
