Victoria and Emmanuel Colleges Jointly Appoint New Testament Professor
By Leslie Shepherd
Victoria and Emmanuel Colleges have jointly appointed Dr. Mona Tokarek LaFosse to the new position of Assistant Professor of New Testament and Sacred Literature Studies.
This is the first time the two colleges that make up Victoria University have jointly appointed a faculty member through an open search process and the first time they have jointly appointed someone to a permanent position.
Dr. LaFosse has been an Assistant Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Studies at Emmanuel since July 2022 and has been teaching Victoria College courses for the past two years. In her new role she will spend two-thirds of her time at Emmanuel and one-third at Victoria.
“Dr. LaFosse has successfully demonstrated collaboration between the two colleges through her excellent teaching, and we look forward to continuing this synergy,” said Emmanuel Principal Dr. HyeRan Kim-Cragg.
“She has a strong record of academic leadership and curriculum development, and as an active researcher, she has published widely on topics related to early Christian texts, social structures and biblical interpretation,” said Victoria Principal Dr. Alex Hernandez.
At Victoria College, Dr. LaFosse has contributed to both first-year programs and the Creativity and Society program. Her popular Vic 100 seminar on “Zombies, Vampires and the Bible” invites students to think about questions of mortality and meaning as they appear in ancient and modern apocalyptic stories. For the past two years, she also taught an upper-year course on “How Stories Work.”
Dr. LaFosse has a strong record of successful grant-writing that has contributed to research, teaching and community at Emmanuel, including the Calvin Teacher-Scholar Vital Worship Grant (with Dr. Kim-Cragg) which is exploring trauma-informed ministry with a group of international doctoral students; the United Church of Canada Seeds of Hope award that contributed to the Indigenous Healing Garden under construction; an Association of Theological Schools Moving Forward in Mission grant for trauma-informed teaching; and the SSHRC-SIG award for an aging, dying and spirituality workshop.
Dr. LaFosse received her PhD from the University of Toronto Department for the Study of Religion in 2011, where her research focused on age, aging and intergenerational relationships in early Christian communities.
She also recently published a book, Honouring Age: The Social Dynamics of Age Structure in 1 Timothy, with McGill-Queens University Press.
Prior to arriving at Victoria, Dr. LaFosse worked at Martin Luther University College in Waterloo, Ont., as an Assistant Professor of Christian Scriptures and Sacred Texts from 2015-2022.
She is president of the Canadian Society of Patristic Studies, a board member of the Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion and co-chair of the Social-Scientific Criticism of the New Testament Section of the Society of Biblical Literature.