Dr. Heidi Wendt, assistant professor in the Department of Religion, is the 2015 recipient of the Honors Teacher of the Year award. Completing her second year at WSU, Dr. Wendt’s area of expertise is the New Testament and Early Christianity, particularly its relation to the wider Greco-Roman world. She regularly teaches a section of “The Bible & Western Culture,” a popular General Education class. She offered an Honors section of this class for the first time this past spring, and the students were so excited about the course they nominated her for this award. They praised her as “eloquent” and “extremely knowledgeable,” and remarked that she handled the course remarkably well and with great professionalism.
Dr. Wendt is shown in this picture with Jeremy Gambrell, a University Honors Scholar who graduated summa cum laude this spring with a B.A. in Religion. He completed his departmental Honors project under Dr. Wendt’s direction, and received the department’s Outstanding Student award this year for his accomplishments.
Dr. Wendt completed her graduate work in ancient Mediterranean Religion and Classics at Brown University, where her dissertation examined the letters of Paul, among other evidence. Her current research investigates the formation of new religious movements, including diverse Christian groups, in the first and second centuries of the Roman Empire. She is the author of the forthcoming book At Temple Gates: The Religions of the Early Roman Empire. Currently, she is in Rome completing research for this project, which will be published next year by Oxford University Press.
Congratulations, Heidi!
