Rafael Neis

I am an ancient historian and a scholar of religious studies with specific interests in sensory history, the body, and the history of knowledge. My first book, The Sense of Sight in Rabbinic Culture: Jewish Ways of Seeing in Late Antiquity, was a cultural history of vision, told through the eyes of the rabbinic movement that straddled Palestine and Mesopotamia. My second book, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species, investigates reproduction and speciation in antiquity and focuses on ancient Jewish sources in conversation with contemporaneous thinkers across Mediterranean, Southwest Asia, and North Africa. I work with history of science and medicine frameworks, as well as with queerfeminist science studies, disability studies, animal studies, and posthumanist approaches.