About
Rachel Rafael "Rafe" Neis is a scholar, writer, educator, and artist. As an associate professor appointed in History and Judaic Studies and core faculty in the Interdepartmental Program in Ancient History, they hold the Jean and Samuel Frankel Chair in Rabbinics. Neis obtained a Ph.D. in Jewish Studies from Harvard University, a Masters in Religious Studies from Boston University, and a law degree from the London School of Economics. They studied painting at the Bezalel Academy of Art & Design, at Camden Working Men’s College, and throughout their graduate studies. Neis seeks to instigate questions about more than human worlds, ritual, bodily sensation, and systems of classification. Their work deploys different modalities including words, painting, mixed media, comics, and zines (all broadly and overlappingly understood).
Their first book The Sense of Sight in Rabbinic Culture: Jewish Ways of Seeing in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2013) won the Salon Baron Prize for best first book in Jewish Studies and an honorable mention for the Jordan Schnitzer Award for books published in Biblical Studies, Rabbinics, Jewish History and Culture in Antiquity in 2010-2013. The Sense of Sight offers a cultural history of vision focusing on late antique rabbis, other Jews, and other minorities living under Roman and Sassanian rule in Palestine and Mesopotamia respectively.
Neis’s research focuses on the culture of the rabbinic movement of the first centuries C.E., and places the rabbis in the context of a broad Mediterranean and Middle Eastern world of late antiquity (for these purposes, ca. 1st century to 7th century CE). They also investigate the ways that rabbinic and ancient Jewish culture is deployed in modern-contemporary arena. Their research and teaching are in the fields of Religion, Law; Gender; Queer Theory; History of Science; Feminist Science Studies; Animal Studies; Disability Studies; Visual Culture; History of the Senses; and Materiality. Besides engaging in academic writing and teaching, they are also committed to multi-media forms of knowledge-making and sharing, from websites to workshops and from collaborative comics to zines. They are currently completing their second book manuscript, When a Woman Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species in Late Antiquity.
Affiliation(s)
- Judaic Studies
- U of M Law School
Field(s) of Study
- Jewish history (particularly late antique)
- Palestinian and Babylonian rabbinic culture
- Religion and mysticism
- Law in the ancient world
- Vision and visuality
Selected Publications:
Books
Articles
