Rafael Neis

Rachel Rafael Neis is a scholar of ancient history and religious studies. WIth a focus on late ancient Roman Palestine and Persian Mesopotamia, particularly rabbinic history and culture, their research encompasses law and legal theory, visuality and the senses, science studies, animal studies, and queer theory. Recently Neis's research has moved in several directions. First, while turning to modern-contemporary historiography on religion, it investigates the ways that the legacies of ancient sacred texts and modern scientific racism have impacted reproductive discourse (including in scholarship on Jewish continuity and "intermarriage") since the nineteenth century to the present. Second, it critically situates ancient Jewish studies vis-a-vis still dominant historiographies centering "ancient history" in "classics" and early Christianity. As part of this effort at decolonial historiography, it considers the investments in the study of rabbinic literature through the category of "law." Third, it considers the ways that scholarship on ancient religion and visual culture retain unquestioned commitments to transhistorical categories of cisgender (i.e. binary concepts of sexgender). While not aiming at projects of recovery, Neis's research investigates the varities of gender that become legible through expanded, nonbinary approaches. Finally,  Neis's long-standing art practice, which was previously kept apart from their scholarship, has progressively become more intertwined both in content and form.  

Neis's first book, The Sense of Sight in Rabbinic Culture: Jewish Ways of Seeing in Late Antiquity (University of Cambridge, 2013), offered a cultural history about the ways rabbis, other Jews, and yet other denizens of the ancient world, understood and experienced vision . Their account embedded rabbinic visuality among Greek and Roman theories of vision and spectacle, Persian-Zoroastrian understandings of the evil eye, and Christian sources on modesty, sexuality, and the gaze. Neis's second book, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species (University of California Press, 2023) mines ancient Jewish writings on menstruation, gynecology, sacrifice, and agriculture for their conceptions of human and nonhuman species and reproduction (aka "generation"). Neis's approach is relentlessly comparative as they place the rabbis in an ancient conversations and modern historiographic interventions about kinds and the generation of lifeforms, while drawing from feminist science studies, disability studies, and animal studies.

As an artist, Neis is committed to creative translation, visualization, and transformative critical recreation of ancient sources. This includes solo and collaborative (or "D.I.T." = "do it together") work, and  takes the form of comics, graphic novellas, and zines, among other media. Recently, they collaborated with C. Michael Chin on an installation of stuffed animals in the Department of History and the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, entitled, "The Rise and Fall of History."

How to cite Rafael Rachel Neis

It is correct practice to cite the author as they are currently known, in this case, Rafael Rachel Neis, even if the work was previously published under a different name (e.g. Rachel Neis). If referring to the author check (rather than assume) pronouns, in this case they/them. 

Affiliations

• Judaic Studies
• History
• IPAH
• IRWG
• Anthro-History
• Comparative Literature

Fields of Study

• Ancient History
• Religious Studies
• Judaism  
• Rabbinic literature
• Law
• History of the senses
• Visual Culture
• Gender and Sexuality
• Science and Medicine