About
Rafe Neis is a scholar, writer, educator, and artist. Appointed in both History and Judaic Studies, Neis serves as the director of the Interdepartmental Program in Ancient History, and holds the Jean and Samuel Frankel Chair of Rabbinics. Neis obtained a Ph.D. in Jewish Studies from Harvard University, a Masters in Religious Studies from Boston University, and (for their sins) 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 (and sensations) about more than human worlds, ritual, bodily sensation, and systems of classification. Their work deploys different modalities including words, painting, mixed media, comics, zines, and collaboration.
Their first book The Sense of Sight in Rabbinic Culture: Jewish Ways of Seeing in Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 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. Their second book, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species (University of California Press, 2023), investigates creaturely species and generation in ancient Jewish writings and other sources in the Mediterranean, Southwest Asia, and North Africa.
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 has been and continues to be deployed in modern-contemporary arena. Their research and teaching are in the fields of Religion, Law; Gender; Trans/Queer Theory; History of Science; Feminist Science Studies; Animal Studies; Disability Studies; Visual Culture; History of the Senses; and Materiality.
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.
Research Areas(s)
- Ancient History; Ancient Jewish History; Talmud and Rabbinic Literature; Religious Studies; Comparative Law and Legal Theory; Science Studies; Animal Studies; Gender and Sexuality; Visual Culture
Affiliation(s)
Field(s) of Study
- Ancient Jewish History
- Talmud and Rabbinic literature
- Law and Legal Theory
- Jewish Visual Culture and Art
- History of the senses
- Ancient Science and Knowledge-Making
- Comics, Graphic Novels, and Zines
- Sex, Sexuality, Gender, and Reproduction
