Eva Mroczek
Simon and Riva Spatz Chair in Jewish Studies, Associate Professor, Religious Studies
Email: Eva.Mroczek@dal.ca
Mailing Address:
Education
- BA, MA, PhD (Toronto)
Biography
I grew up in Ontario and completed my education at the University of Toronto, with interludes in Krakow, Oslo, and Jerusalem. After completing an MA in Modern Jewish Thought, I dove into Ancient Judaism and its literature for my PhD. After graduate school, I taught In the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University and then at the University of California, Davis, where I also directed the Jewish Studies Program, before returning home to Canada in 2024 to take up the Simon and Riva Spatz Chair in Jewish Studies at Dalhousie.
Research Interests
My research stands at the intersection of early Jewish literary cultures (including the Hebrew Bible, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, Dead Sea Scrolls, and rabbinic literature) and Book History. My first book, The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity (Oxford UP 2016), illustrates how early Jewish writers imagined their own sacred writing before the Bible existed as a concept. The book was the finalist for the 2018 AJS Jordan Schnitzer Book Prize, the winner of the 2017 De Long Book History Prize awarded by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), and the winner of the 2017 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Prize for Theological Promise. I am currently completing my second book, Out of the Cave: The Possibility of a New Scriptural Past, an intellectual history of manuscript discovery stories and what they tell us about history, the Bible, and ourselves. My next project is a guide to imaginary books in ancient and medieval Jewish lore.