Carolyn Osiek is the Catholic Distinguished Visiting Professor of New Testament at Brite Divinity School of Texas Christian University. She holds a doctorate in New Testament and Christian Origins from Harvard University, and is a past president of the Catholic Biblical Association and the Society of Biblical Literature. She is editor of the fifteen-volume Message of Biblical Spirituality series (published by Michael Glazier/Liturgical Press), and is a former associate editor of The Bible Today and New Testament Book Review Editor of the Catholic Biblical Quarterly. She is the author of Beyond Anger: On Being a Feminist in the Church (1986) and What Are They Saying about the Social Setting of the New Testament? (revised edition, 1992), both published by Paulist Press. She is one of four editors of Silent Voices, Sacred Lives: Women's Readings for the Liturgical Year (Paulist Press, 1992) and co-author with David Balch of Families in the New Testament World: Households and House Churches (Westminster John Knox, 1997).

She also published The Shepherd of Hermas (Hermeneia Commentaries; Fortress Press, 1999), Philippians and Philemon (Abingdon New Testament Commentaries; Abingdon Press, 2000), and co-edited with David Balch, Early Christian Families in Context: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue (Eerdmans, 2003). Her most recent publications are: Ordained Women in the Early Church, co-edited with Kevin Madigan (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) and A Woman's Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity, co-authored with Margaret MacDonald (Fortress Press, 2005). She teaches in areas of social life, social-science interpretation, and women in early Christianity.