Lecturer in Jewish Studies
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Prof.听Myers:
Myers earned her Ph.D. in Bible and the Ancient Near East from the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. Her teaching interests include the history and literature of the ancient Near East, particularly the Hebrew Bible, as well as the later Jewish populations that inherited these cultural traditions.
Her research explores diverse aspects of Israelite, Judean, and Mesopotamian cultures and the ways they interacted with one another. She is particularly interested in power relations and how they shaped scribal innovation in the ancient Near East under empire. She is also interested in how women exerted power and influence in the ancient world.
Her dissertation, The Ark under Empire: Confronting Ideologies of Domination through the Construction of a Cult Object, examines the historical circumstances behind the production of biblical narratives about the Ark of the Covenant. She argues that these texts confront Mesopotamian imperial ideology through the literary construction of a cult object, using references to known historical groups, worshiped deities, and geographic locations to promote the authors鈥� ideological objectives. She has also published and presented several works on the composition and content of the biblical books of Samuel.
In addition to revising her dissertation for publication, she is currently working on an article that addresses a Neo-Assyrian queen mother鈥檚 use of prophetic oracles to assert power while her son was in exile. In future research, she looks forward to exploring how the imperial subjugation of Yehud during the Second Temple period (ca. 538 BCE - 70 CE) impacted the production of early Jewish texts, including biblical and post-biblical literature, and how Judean/Jewish religious discourse evolved under succeeding empires.
Areas of Research Related to Jewish Studies:
Her research explores diverse aspects of Israelite, Judean, and Mesopotamian cultures and the ways they interacted with one another. She is particularly interested in power relations and how they shaped scribal innovation in the ancient Near East under empire. She is also interested in how women exerted power and influence in the ancient world.
Courses Taught:
- Jewish History to 1492 (JWST/HIST 1828)
- Introduction to Jewish Culture (JWST/GSLL 2350)
Recent and Forthcoming Publications (Selected):
鈥淓li鈥檚 Wicked Sons and the Composition of 1 Samuel 1-4.鈥� Vetus Testamentum 72/2 (2022): 237-256
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