Chana Shacham-Rosby

Chana Shacham-Rosby

Ben Gurion University of the Negev

Chana Shacham-Rosby received her PhD from the Department of Jewish History at Ben Gurion University in 2019 for her dissertation: “Elijah the Prophet in Medieval Ashkenazi Jewish Culture”. She has been a research fellow at the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters. Her article “Elijah the Prophet: The Guard Dog of Israel” (Jewish History 30(3), 165-182) was awarded best student paper by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Ben-Gurion University in 2016. Shacham-Rosby’s research interests include exploring intersections and mutual influences of ritual, materiality and religious thought. As a Starr Fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies, Shacham-Rosby will pursue a project titled: “Thrones and Cathedrae: Ritual Seats from Late Antiquity to Early Modernity.” The project focuses on ritual uses of the symbol of the “Chair” in the context of two entangled themes related to this ubiquitous object, the first being assertion of authority, and the second is presence and absence. The primary case study will be two iconic components that are part of the Brit Milah, the Jewish circumcision ceremony, the “Chair of Elijah” and the “Chair of the Ba’al Brit”.