Join us for the next installment of Religious Studies Reads, a twice-annual informal book club. This semester, we will be discussing Yii-Jan Lin's, Immigration and Apocalypse: How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigration (Yale University Press, 2024). 

Lin is this year's Harshbarger Lecturer and will be joining us in person for the book club discussion. There are thirty free copies of the book available on a first come first served basis. We only request that if you take a book, you commit to attending the event. You can pick a copy of the book from 108 Weaver Building from now until we run out of copies.

Yii-Jan Lin is associate professor of New Testament at Yale Divinity School, where she teaches the critical study of ancient texts and their interpretation, especially in relation to race and gender. She is the author of Immigration and Apocalypse: How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigration (Yale University Press, 2024), which traces Christian apocalyptic thinking from Columbus to the second Trump administration to show how the images, vocabulary, and ideas of Revelation have fueled anti-immigrant movements throughout American history. Lin is also the author of The Erotic Life of Manuscripts (Oxford University Press, 2016), which examines how metaphors of race, family, evolution, and genetic inheritance have shaped the goals and assumptions of New Testament textual criticism from the eighteenth century to the present.

Lin serves on the executive Council for the Society of Biblical Literature as well as the society’s committees on the Bible in America, and Minoritized Criticism and Biblical Interpretation. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Biblical Literature and Early Christianity, as well as in The Conversation and Religion Dispatches, and she has been interviewed for AXIOS and Rolling Stone.

Her current project continues her work on migration and religion in a book focused on the proliferation of militarized borders and walls globally, and the use of sacred texts to understand them.