Shira Eliassian is a PhD candidate in the Religious Studies Department concentrating in Early Mediterranean and West Asian Religions. She focuses on the composition of rabbinic literature in its cultural and historical context. Her dissertation, “Representations of Postmortem, Pre-Eschatological Existence in the Babylonian Talmud,” considers how the rabbis’ legal, anthropological, and cosmological attitudes towards death were shaped by their Christian and Zoroastrian interlocutors in Sasanian Iran in late antiquity. Shira’s work also explores gender, sexuality, and heterodoxy, with a focus on marginalized voices and ritual practices in the ancient world. Her research on this topic includes a forthcoming publication in a volume to be published by Brown Judaica Series: “The Matrons of Mesopotamia: The Aramaic Incantation Bowls as an Archive of Motherhood.” In addition to her teaching experiences at Yale, she has also taught “Death & Dying in Judaism,” a course of her own design, at Amherst College in the spring of 2025.
At Yale, Shira has served as a convener for the Late Antiquity Reading Group, and as a coordinator for the 2024 Ancient Judaism Regional Seminar.