University of California, Los Angeles

Faculty Member, History and NELC

About

I am an Associate Professor of ancient Mediterranean religions at UCLA with a split appointment in the Departments of History and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. I am also the Director for the UCLA Center for the Study of Religion and the Faculty Advisor for the Study of Religion major. I completed my PhD in 2004 in the Department of Religion at Princeton University with a dissertation on the historical development of early Jewish mystical literature.

My teaching and research focus on Jewish culture, literature, and society in the ancient Mediterranean world. I have a special interest in the emergence of distinctive Jewish apocalyptic, mystical, magical, and liturgical discourses in this period, and their close and dynamic relationships to the ambient Graeco-Roman and Christian cultures. My interests also encompass a number of other closely related topics, such as: Greek-Jewish literature; the representation of Jews and Judaism in Greek, Latin, and Syriac sources (both "pagan" and Christian); relations between Jews and Christians in late Roman Palestine; martyrdom and religious violence in Late Antiquity; Midrash and Hebrew narrative literature; magical literature and practice in Late Antiquity; and theory and method in the study of religion.

I am currently working on a book that traces the shifting image of Rome in late antique Jewish culture. I am particularly interested in exploring the various strategies employed by Jews to address the emergence of a distinctively Christian discourse of empire over the course of the fourth through seventh centuries.

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