Sarina Meyer

Thesis supervisor: Lorenzo DiTommaso

Research subject: Expanding the hero's journey and monomyth by incorporating the heroism of real and fictional women of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds into the foundational assumptions of who can be a hero and what their journey entails.

Sarina Odden Meyer (she/her) is a first-year PhD student in the Department of Religions and Cultures at Concordia University. Prior to her doctoral work, Sarina has worn many hats. She completed a BS in Psychology (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2002), an MDiv (Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, 2007), and an MA in Second Temple Judaism (McGill, 2017). She is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA, 2009; Canada, 2017) and served as Associate Pastor at Eastminster Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, PA (part-time, 2007-2009), and Pastor at Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Beaconsfield, QC (2017-2023). She was a stay-at-home mom for 10 years (2007-2017). Throughout all of these experiences, Sarina has centered equity, diversity, and inclusion, working on racial reconciliation in Pittsburgh, advocating for LGBTQ+ inclusion in the Presbyterian Church in Canada, and incorporating scholarship on Indigenous worldviews and recovered women’s histories into her sermons.

Sarina’s research focuses on recovering lost women’s histories and how that knowledge influences our scholarly methodologies. She has a paper forthcoming outlining a new methodology for text criticism of New Testament texts about women based on recovered women’s history from the Second Temple Period and Late Antiquity.

Her PhD research focuses on how recovered lost women’s histories change our understanding of contemporary popular culture heroism. Current models of heroism (the hero’s journey, the monomyth) focus particularly on a white male trope to the exclusion of women, LGBTQ+ people, and people of other ethnic backgrounds. She seeks to create a more expansive model by incorporating the heroism of real and fictional women of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds into the foundational assumptions of who can be a hero and what their journey entails. Her research will provide a more expansive scholarly methodology for the field, and also a tool for contemporary story-tellers.

Publications

Meyer, Sarina Odden. “The Heroines are in the Details: A Socio-Historical Text-Critical Method for New Testament Texts About Women,” JSP. 2025 Forthcoming.