Ellen Robbins is a Lecturer in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at John Hopkins University. She has a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from New York University and a M.Div. from Yale University. She has been teaching at Johns Hopkins since 1993, and is the author of The Storyteller and the Garden of Eden, a radical rereading of the first chapters of Genesis.
Biblical texts and biblical history have been quoted to justify American slavery and to oppose it, and have played a role in the development of segregation after emancipation – alongside attempts to overcome it that continue to this day.