Ra‘anan Boustan is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at Yale Divinity School, with appointments in Jewish Studies and Religious Studies. His research and teaching explore the dynamic intersections between Judaism and other Mediterranean religious traditions in late antiquity, with a special focus on the impact of Christianization on Jewish culture and society in late antiquity.
Boustan completed his B.A. in Classics at Brown University and a Vrij Doctoraal Letteren in Classics and Religious Studies from the University of Amsterdam during his stay in the Netherlands as a Fulbright Fellow. He received his Ph.D. in Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean in the Department of Religion at Princeton University. He held a prestigious Harrington Faculty Fellowship in 2011–12 in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and has twice been a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Boustan is the author of From Martyr to Mystic: Rabbinic Martyrology and the Making of Merkavah Mysticism (2005) and co-author of The Elephant Mosaic Panel in the Synagogue at Huqoq (2017). He is the site historian for the Huqoq Excavation Project in Lower Galilee and is currently collaborating with Dr. Karen Britt on the publication of the newly discovered mosaic floor of the synagogue at Huqoq. He and Britt recently received the Frank A. Dutra Annual Award for best article published in Mediterranean Studies in 2023. Boustan has co-edited ten books or special issues of journals, including Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History: Authority, Diaspora, Tradition (2011) and Rabbinization and Diversity: Dynamics of Difference and Hegemony from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages (2025). He serves as Editor-in-Chief of Studies in Late Antiquity published by University of California Press.