Francesca Stavrakopoulou is Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion. She is an internationally renowned scholar and award-winning author, specializing in material religion, death studies, and the ancient religious cultures in which the Bible emerged. Actively engaged in public scholarship, her media work includes writing and presenting the BBC TV documentary series Bible's Buried Secrets, and narrating the serialization of her most recent book on BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week. 

Thoroughly interdisciplinary in scope, much of Francesca's research has been funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, and the Leverhulme Trust. Focusing primarily on ancient Israelite/Judahite religions and material cultures, she is particularly interested in those practices most at odds with Western cultural preferences - especially those bound up with the materiality and sociality of the body (whether living or dead, divine or human).

Her most recent monograph, God: An Anatomy (Picador 2021 and Knopf 2022), explored ancient constructs of divine corporeality. It won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for Non-Fiction, was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize, and named a Best Book of the Year in the Economist, the Sunday Times, and Publishers Weekly (the ‘Bible of the book business’ in the US). In addition to its serialization on BBC Radio 4, the book generated significant media coverage, including two episodes of BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking, and special episodes of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's God Forbid, Dan Snow's History Hit, and BBC History Extra. The book has since been published in several foreign-language translations.  

Before joining the University of Exeter, Francesca studied Theology - and then the Hebrew Bible - at the University of Oxford, where she also gained her doctorate. She spent a further three years teaching and researching in Oxford as a Junior Research Fellow, before taking up a post at Exeter in 2005. She was appointed to a personal chair in 2011. You can learn more about Francesca in this TV interview, this piece in the New Statesman, and this episode of BBC Radio 3's Private Passions. 

As a patron of both Humanists UK and Defence Humanists, Francesca advocates for improved mental-health services and non-religious pastoral support for serving and veteran members of the Armed Forces and their families. She is a member of the Armed Forces Covenant Community Network.