For One HDS Grad, the Surreal Made Real

Lydia Bremer had an unusual and lofty aim in her first year as a Harvard Divinity School student.

"I made it my goal my first year to try and study in as many of the libraries as possible, and I reached a pretty substantial sum of them," said the master of divinity degree candidate. "Even on a weekend … I'd sort of library hop. The resources at Andover-Harvard Theological Library are incredible, and there's nothing quite like walking up the marble stairs of Widener Library. To make that part of my own experience has been a wonderful opportunity."

Bremer, who grew up not far from Green Bay, Wisconsin, often spent her weekends at Harvard indulging her passion to study ancient Christianity. That, along with her dedication to research and scholarship, has led her to her next step: entering a PhD program.

"I always wanted to enter a doctoral program, so it's really a dream come true," she said.

After Commencement on May 28, Bremer will continue her scholarship in the PhD program at Harvard, studying New Testament and early Christianity.

With aspirations of becoming a university professor, Bremer has had no shortage of mentors at HDS. She said she's made notes on how some of her favorite Divinity School professors have influenced her, and she hopes to use their styles in her own classroom one day.

"I've learned a great deal about pedagogy here. That's something Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza brings into her classes, which is to talk about what the experience of learning and teaching does to the material that we teach, and how the way that we do it informs the types of questions and conversations that we can have," she said. "I'm watching how HDS professors Laura Nasrallah, Karen King, and Giovanni Bazzana teach, and I'm keeping all of that in a little file folder in my mind and thinking about what pieces of it I can take into my own teaching."

At times, being at HDS has been surreal for Bremer, who began learning from her professors even before she arrived in Cambridge.

"Walking up for the first time to Karen King's office, who I had read all throughout my undergraduate career and now she's my adviser, and meeting Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, my mentor, I thought, 'this is not real life,' but it was my life," she said.

Through her participation in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Bremer was able to work closely with her mentors. She became a managing editor and connected with many feminist scholars from a variety of institutions. She also started the Feminist Studies in Religion student group as part of her field education experience. She said it helped to create a space on campus to talk with other students about feminist issues, as well as to learn from one another and push each other to think about things from a different perspective.

Feminist studies, she said, are intermarried into much, if not all, of her work.

"What drives my main research interests are questions about humanness and what it means to be human, specifically how that relates to the body. Feminist values and ethics really influence that," she said.

While a student in Professor Laura Nasrallah's "Archaeology and the World of the New Testament" course, Bremer was able to travel to Turkey and Greece, where she and her classmates explored ancient cities and sites. She had been working on a project that imagined how bodies moved through the city of Philippi.

"Being at the site and having read all these books, and all of a sudden it's all out in front of me, I stopped thinking and just started talking and moving through the space myself. Negotiating through this ancient site, it was just the most exhilarating feeling in the world," she said.

During her Divinity School tenure, Bremer switched from a master of theological studies track to the master of divinity program. The move gave her a unique perspective that she will take with her as she embarks on becoming an educator.

"Switching to the MDiv program was a chance to take what I wanted out of the MTS program and start pushing it to the more. Because I'm so interested in bodies and lived experience, it seemed like a natural fit," she said. "It was also an opportunity to think about my scholarship and my position in the classroom and my version of preaching as a type of ministry … being a non-traditional minister."

—by Michael Naughton