Rate My Professor Deane Galbraith

Dr Deane Galbraith is a Senior Lecturer in the Religion Programme within the Humanities Division at the University of Otago. He earned an LLB/BCom from the University of Auckland, a BTheol(Hons), and a PhD from the University of Otago, with his doctoral thesis titled Manufacturing Judean Myth: The Spy Narrative in Numbers 13–14 as Rewritten Tradition. In his role, he teaches undergraduate and postgraduate papers including RELS 111: Māori Spirituality and the World’s Religions, RELS 203/RELS 303: Ancient Religion: Egypt to Mesopotamia, RELS 241/RELS 341: Religion, Conflict and Conspiracy Theory, and RELS 523: Key Debates in Religious Studies focusing on deeper meaning, esotericism, and secret knowledge.

Galbraith's research specializations include ancient religion, ancient Judaism, New Zealand conspiracy theories, Māori spirituality, and giant traditions in historical and contemporary contexts. His publications appear in leading journals and handbooks, such as Pigden Revisited, or In Defence of Popper’s Critique of the Conspiracy Theory of Society in Philosophy of the Social Sciences (2022), Heaven in the Oxford Handbook to the Bible in American Popular Culture (2020), Jeremiah Never Saw That Coming: How Jesus Miscalculated the End Times in Jeremiah in History and Tradition (2019), Whence the Giant Jesus and his Talking Cross? The Resurrection in Gospel of Peter 10.39–42 as Prophetic Fulfilment of LXX Psalm 18 in New Testament Studies (2017), and The Perpetuation of Racial Assumptions in Biblical Studies in History, Politics and the Bible from the Iron Age to the Media Age (2016). Recent contributions encompass Ngāti Hotu in Paradise: How contemporary Hotu in Aotearoa New Zealand defend their white pre-Polynesian settlement theory in Journal of the Bible & its Reception (2025), Religion without scare quotes: cognitive science of religion and the humanities in Religion, Brain & Behavior (2023), and the two-part Unveiling the length and girth of John's Millennium in Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha (2025), comparing Revelation 20 with the Apocalypse of Weeks and Virgil's Aeneid. He serves as Māngai Māori board member of the Aotearoa-New Zealand Association for Biblical Studies and affiliates with Ngāpuhi me Te Rarawa iwi.