AnneMarie Luijendijk is Head of New College West and the William H. Danforth Professor of Religion. A historian of early Christianity and a papyrologist, Luijendijk studied at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and received her doctorate from Harvard Divinity School. Her scholarly interests involve the social history of early Christianity. Her first book, Greetings in the Lord: Early Christians and the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (2008), narrates the lives of hitherto unknown Christians in the third and fourth centuries based on papyrus documents from the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus. In 2014, she published Forbidden Oracles? The Gospel of the Lots of Mary, a book about an ancient Egyptian miniature book with Christian oracular answers. She currently is working on a book called From Gospels to Garbage, about the owners and users of early Christian books and how these books may have ended up at the trash heaps, and has begun another research project on Fashion, footwear and faith in late antiquity.

Professor Luijendijk is married to Jan Willem van der Werff, and loves spending time with him, their four children, Kees (22), Erik (17), and twins Rosemarie and Annabel (9), and dog, Bobo. She enjoys making music (singing in a choir, playing bells and piano), reading, walking, riding her (Dutch) bicycle, doing yoga, caring for her many houseplants, including papyrus plants, and flowers. She also likes to cook and talk and laugh with friends. She especially enjoys getting to know the wonderful New College West students, for instance with a cup of Tiger tea in her office, or sharing in meal in the dining hall.