Heidi Marx

• RLGN 2112 - Medicine, Magic, and Miracle in the Ancient World

I am a Professor in the Department of Religion where I have worked since 2009. My main areas of research are in late ancient philosophy and medicine. For more about my research, teaching, and administrative work, please see my academic website and my academia.edu site. In my spare time, I am an avid gardener and potter. 

• PhD (History), University of California, Santa Barbara, 2009
• PhD (Philosophy), Pennsylvania State University, 1999
• BA (Honours), University of Calgary, 1993

Research interests

• Ancient medicine
• Ancient philosophy (especially Platonism)
• Ancient botany/plant ontology in antiquity
• Ancient demonology and ideas about spirits
• Early Christian gnostic thought

Research summary

My first two books were about late ancient Platonists (300-450 CE). The first focused on ideas about spirits, especially demons, among these philosophers. The second book was a biography of a female philosopher, Sosipatra of Pergamum. I have just completed a very large co-authored sourcebook on ancient medicine. My next projects will focus on ideas about plants in the ancient world. This work will be informed by modern ecological questions and recent thinking about object oriented ontology and new materialisms. 

Research affiliations/groups

• ReMeDHe co-founder and co-director 
• Society for Biblical Literature
• American Academy of Religion
• North American Patristics Society
• European Academy of Religion

Books

• Kristi Upson-Saia, Heidi Marx, and Jared Secord, Medicine, Health, and Healing in the Ancient Mediterranean (500 BCE-600 CE): A Sourcebook (University of California Press, August 2023)
• Heidi Marx, Sosipatra of Pergamum: Philosopher and Oracle (Oxford University Press, Women in Antiquity Series, June 2021)
• Heidi Marx-Wolf, Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority: Platonists, Priests, and Gnostics in the Third Century CE (Divinations Series, University of Pennsylvania Press, January 2016)

Select articles

• Heidi Marx-Wolf, “Living Plants, Dead Animals, and Other Matters: Embryos and Demons in Porphyry of Tyre,” Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural 7.1 (2018): 1-26
• Heidi Marx, “Chapter 24: Religion, Medicine, and Health” in Blackwell’s Companion to Religion in Late Antiquity, Nicholas Baker-Brian, Josef Lossl, ed.s, 511-28, Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2018
• Heidi Marx-Wolf, “The Good Doctor: Imperial Physicians and Medical Professionalization in Late Antiquity,” Studia Patristica 81 (2017): 79-90
• Heidi Marx-Wolf and Kristi Upson-Saia, “The State of the Question: Religion, Medicine, Disability and Health in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Late Antiquity 8.2 (Fall 2015): 257-72
• Heidi Marx-Wolf, “Medicine.” In Late Ancient Knowing, ed. Catherine Chin and Moulie Vidas, 80-98. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015
• Heidi Marx-Wolf, “Pythagoras the Theurgist: Porphyry and Iamblichus on the role of ritual in the philosophical life.” In Religious Competition in the Third Century CE: Jews, Christians, and the Greco-Roman World, ed. Jordan D. Rosenblum, Lily Vuong, and Nathaniel DesRosiers, 32-38. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2014
• Heidi Marx-Wolf, “High Priests of the Highest God: Third Century Platonists as Ritual Experts.” Journal of Early Christian Studies18.4 (Winter 2010): 481-513