Francesca Stavrakopoulou studied Theology at the University of Oxford. She completed her doctorate in 2002, her doctoral thesis exploring the misrepresentation of the past in the Hebrew Bible was publishing 2004 as "King Manasseh and Child Sacrifice: Biblical Distortions of Historical Realities". She spent further three years in Oxford teaching and researching (first as a Junior Research Fellow at Worcester College, then as the Career Development Fellow in the Faculty of Theology) before joining the Department of Theology and Religion of the University of Exeter in 2005, where she still works.