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Yaron Eliav is an award winning scholar and teacher at the University of Michigan (most recently the 2019 University of Michigan Honored Instructor Award and the 2022 LSA Humanities Research Opportunity Grant). He is an expert in the fields of Judaic Studies, Jewish history in the Roman world, Talmud, and archaeology, as well as in the fields of Classical (Greek and Latin) and Early Christian studies. In the years 2015-2018, he directed a project, “Changing the Ways We Teach the Ancient World”, which received a $750,000 grant, the largest ever given by the University of Michigan to a project in the humanities. In this undertaking, Yaron led a multi-member team of scientists and scholars who were aiming to transform the learning experience of undergraduate students who study the ancient world. One of the highlights of this team is a documentary film – Paul in Athens – which premiered in Fall 2018. Earlier in his career, his book, God’s Mountain: The Temple Mount in Time, Space, and Memory  (Johns Hopkins University Press 2005; soft-cover 2008) won two national awards: The 2005 American Association of Publishers (AAP) award for best scholarly book on religion, and the 2006 Salo Baron prize for best first book in Judaic Studies from the American Academy for Jewish Studies. Yaron was invited to present and discuss his work in numerous places around the world; from Oxford and London to Moscow and Jerusalem; and in the United states, from the Getty Museum and UCLA on the west coast through Chicago and Indiana to Princeton, NYU, Brown, Brandeis, and Middlebury on the east. In 2004-5, he was a senior fellow at the prestigious Institute of Advanced Studies in Jerusalem. More recently, in 2023 Princeton University Press published Yaron’s book – A Jew in the Roman Bathhouse: Cultural Interaction in the Ancient Mediterranean. Currently, He lives with his wife and his youngest son in Ann Arbor, Michigan. There, he pursues his research that combines archaeology and talmudic, early Christian, and classical literatures in order to study the multi-faceted cultural environment of the Roman Mediterranean with emphasis on Material Culture and the encounter between Jews and Graeco-Roman environment. Other than teaching and advising graduate and undergraduate students, Yaron is working on a new book project, called The Rabbis: An Archaeological History.

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