Professor Hugh Houghton FHEA

My office is Room 347 in the ERI Building.

All post should be addressed to me at ITSEE, Department of Theology and Religion, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT.

• PhD (Birmingham)
• MPhil (Cantab.)
• MA (Cantab.)
• BA (Leeds)

Hugh Houghton is Professor of New Testament Textual Scholarship and Director of the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing. He holds two degrees in Classics from Cambridge, specialising in the linguistics of early Christian texts, and degrees in Theology from Leeds and Birmingham. His first appointment at the University of Birmingham was in 2003 as a Teaching Fellow in the Institute for Archaeology and Antiquity, writing and delivering courses on Greek and Latin language and literature. He has been involved with ITSEE since its inception, working as a Research Fellow on the Vetus Latina Iohannes and Codex Sinaiticus projects. He was Principal Investigator on the COMPAUL project funded by the European Research Council from 2011 to 2016; from 2010 to 2013, he was also Principal Investigator on the “Workspace for Collaborative Editing”, a collaborative endeavour between the universities of Birmingham, Münster and Trier funded by the AHRC/DFG.

From 2018-23, he is principal investigator on the European Research Council CATENA project, and was co-investigator on the AHRC Codex Zacynthius project from 2018–20. In recent years, he has identified new witnesses to the earliest Latin translations of the Gospels, worked on the online Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Bezae and published a study of the evidence for the gospel text used by Augustine. His recent publications include a monograph on The Latin New Testament with Oxford University Press and an English translation of the rediscovered fourth-century Commentary on the Gospels by Fortunatianus of Aquileia. Both of these are available online in open access.

He was appointed Director of ITSEE and Director of Research for the Department of Theology and Religion in 2017. He is one of the convenors of the Birmingham Colloquium on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament and was a Director of the International Patristics Conference from 2015–20. He serves as executive editor of the Texts and Studies book series and has been on various editorial boards including the Journal of Theological Studies and New Testament Studies and the Corpus Christianorum series latina (Brepols). He is on the editorial committee of the United Bible Societies' Greek New Testament and the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece.

Professor Houghton has taught modules on New Testament Greek and the Pauline Epistles, as well as the Special Study Module and Undergraduate Dissertation.

I would be glad to hear from potential students interested in:

The New Testament in Latin
The New Testament in Greek
The Bible in Early Christian Authors

Birmingham offers doctoral and masters level research degrees by Distance Learning, with regular supervisions by video conference. Even though it is best for doctoral students to come to Birmingham and work along team members in ITSEE, I have found Distance Learning to be a very successful model for those unable to relocate.

I am currently lead supervisor for the following doctoral research projects:

Family Π in the Gospel according to Mark (Timothy Mitchell)
The Pseudo-Oecumenian Catena on Romans (Jacopo Marcon)
Chrysostom's Homilies on Romans (Peter Montoro)
The Text and Transmission of Colossians (Zachary Skarka)
The Arabic Tradition of the Epistle to the Romans (Duane McCrory)
The Catenae on the Acts of the Apostles (Emanuele Scieri)
Codex Boernerianus (Alec Fisher)
The Development of Catenae on the Gospels (Andrew Patton)
The Catena on Ephesians (Clark Bates)
The Verona Psalter (Oliver Norris)

I was lead supervisor for the following completed doctoral projects:

Origen's Quotations of Romans, 2 Corinthians and Galatians (Matthew Steinfeld)
An Online Environment for Collaborative New Testament Research (Troy Griffitts)
The Pseudo-Oecumenian Catena on Galatians (Dora Panella)
Tertullian's Text of the New Testament outside the Gospels (Benjamin D. Haupt)
The Text and Transmission of 2 Thessalonians (Grant Edwards)
The Vulgate Text of the Catholic Epistles: Its Language, Origin and Relationship with the Vetus Latina (Anna Persig)
A New Analysis of the Scholia Photiana in the Pseudo-Oecumenian Catena Tradition (Chiara Coppola)


For details of other recent and ongoing doctorates in the field of New Testament Textual Criticism, visit http://www.igntp.org/doctoral.html

Find out more - our PhD Theology and Religion  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

• Department of Theology and Religion, Collaborative Programmes Officer (St Mary's College, Oscott)
• Departmental Representative, Anglican Chaplaincy Trust
• Executive Editor (Pauline Epistles), Treasurer and Webmaster for the International Greek New Testament Project (www.igntp.org)
• Executive Editor of the book series Texts and Studies (Gorgias Press)
• Academic Board of Corpus Christianorum
• Co-organiser, Birmingham Colloquium
• Member of the Society of Biblical Literature, Studiorum Noui Testamenti Societas (SNTS), International Association of Patristic Studies, Association of Manuscripts and Archives in Research Collections, European Association of Digital Humanities