Jewish Studies Workshop with Shira Eliassian: "A Tale of Two Hauntings: The Babylonian Talmud's Reimagination of Postmortem Sentience in y.Berakhot 4d"

The Yale Jewish Studies Workshop, which meets regularly throughout the fall and spring semester, features pre-circulated works-in-progress by new faculty members, visiting professors, research scholars, postdoctoral associates, and advanced doctoral students. This workshop provides an important opportunity for conversation across temporal and disciplinary boundaries within Jewish Studies. All members of the university community are warmly invited to join these workshops and learn together. Lunch is provided. 

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 considers how the Babylonian rabbis’ legal, anthropological, and cosmological attitudes towards death were shaped by their Christian and Zoroastrian interlocutors in Sasanian Iran in late antiquity.