Dr. Sabrina Higgins

Sabrina C. Higgins is an Assistant Professor cross-appointed between the Departments of Global Humanities and Archaeology at Simon Fraser University. She completed her Ph.D. in Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa, with a focus on the material evidence for the cult of the Virgin Mary in Late Antique Egypt, a project she is currently transforming into her first monograph. She is also an active field archaeologist, currently serving as the Assistant Director of the excavations of a late antique church at Golemo Gradište in North Macedonia. In addition to this project, she has excavated at various sites in Egypt, Bulgaria and Greece. As an archaeologist and art historian, moreover, her work is inherently multidisciplinary, intersecting the fields of Late Antique Studies, Archaeology, Religious Studies, Art History, Papyrology, and Gender Studies, and her work has appeared in various journals, including the Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Eastern Christian Art, and the Journal of the Canadian Society for Coptic Studies. She is also a recent recipient of a SSHRC Insight Development Grant for her project ‘The Early Cult of the Virgin and the Hegemony of the Text’, which interrogates the material evidence for the early cult of the Virgin across the entire Eastern Mediterranean Basin. More broadly, she is also interested in the ways in which art and space interact within Late-Antique Christianity religious structures and the manner in which art is used by socially-marginalized populations to exert agency.