Alumni Highlight: Sara Ronis

January 3, 2019

I’m in my third year as an assistant professor in the Theology Department at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas. At St. Mary’s, I teach classes in the Hebrew Bible and its reception, and religion and theology more generally. This semester, for example, I’m teaching a course on forms of religious pilgrimage; I’m excited to be taking fourteen students to Israel over Spring Break as part of the course.

I recently published a book chapter, “A Demonic Servant in Rav Papa’s Household: Demons as Subjects in the Mesopotamian Talmud,” in The Aggada of the Babylonian Talmud and its Cultural World, edited by Geoffrey Herman and Jeffrey Rubenstein (Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2018). Another article, “A Seven-Headed Demon in the House of Study: Understanding a Rabbinic Demon in Light of Zoroastrian, Christian, and Babylonian Textual Traditions,” is coming out in AJS Review this spring. My book manuscript, “Demons in the Details: Demonic Discourse and Rabbinic Culture in the Babylonian Talmud,” is currently under review. I’m now working on a new project, thinking through rabbinic narratives about ethnic others in conversation with film theory.

I recently received a grant from the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion for a project I’ll be implementing in my department, titled “Teaching Theology to Generation Z: Curricular Change for the 21st Century.” I also co-coordinate the Community for Teaching and Learning (CTL) at St. Mary’s, where I organize pedagogical workshops and guest speakers for faculty development.