Current Project

Laura recently completed a book project titled Archival Historiography in Jewish Antiquity (Oxford 2020) which invites interpreters to read several books from the Hebrew Bible as archival spaces as well as stories. This book project seeks to explain narrative ruptures in certain ancient Jewish texts by likening them to text collections. This project takes its cues from the both the cultural power that archives wielded in the ancient Near East, as well as the importance of the Persian archive within the biblical stories of Ezra and Esther. It also draws on recent discourses in postcolonial theory which views archives as crucial instruments of imperial control and as agents of memory creation and preservation.