Megan Nutzman is a scholar of religion in the ancient Mediterranean world, focusing on the Greek-speaking East in the Roman and late antique periods. Her research is interdisciplinary, encompassing the texts and material culture of Greek and Roman cults alongside those of ancient Judaism and early Christianity, and especially on interactions among them. Recent work has focused on how members of different ethnic, cultural, and religious communities approached the same task, such as healing or commemoration of the dead, and how differences in their practices reflect the contours of each group, such as in her 2022 book, Contested Cures: Identity and Ritual Healing in Roman and Late Antique Palestine (Edinburgh University Press), which received the Frank Moore Cross Award from the American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR) in 2023. Contested Cures examines the various methods that people used to seek divine healing and the rhetoric of elite authors who used the acceptance or avoidance of certain healing rituals as markers of group identity. Her current book project, Healing Waters: Ritual and Remedy in the Ancient World, explores the ritual and medical use of water across the ancient Mediterranean world through the immersion, consumption, and topical application of water to restore health. In addition to this monograph, she is working on a shorter, reader-friendly volume on late antique amulets, bringing into dialogue amulet corpora that are typically studied in isolation according to language or medium and considering how the contours of different communities are reflected in choices made by the ritual practitioners who crafted the amulets and the individuals who wore them. Other publications consider whether Asklepios was understood to heal by touch, Jewish epitaphs from Rome, hot springs as sites of ritual healing, the portrayal of Mary in the Protevangelium of James, and the relationship between amulets and tefillin. 

Prior to joining the Classics Department at Ohio State in 2025, she was Associate Professor of History at Old Dominion University. She has received funding for her research from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Albright Institute for Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, and the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan.