Assistant Director Laura Lieber to present paper at SBL

Assistant Director Laura Lieber to present paper at SBL

Religion Professor Laura Lieber, Assistant Director of the Duke Center for Jewish Studies will present her paper "The Play's the Thing": Theatricality in Aramaic Piyyutim at this year's International Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) Meeting held in Amsterdam.  She will give her paper in a session entitled "Early Judaism and Rabbinics" to be held on July 25, from 9-12.  

Abstract:

Liturgical poems not only “translate” biblical narratives into poetry; they do so for a performative context. In this paper, I will examine a selection of Aramaic piyyutim which retell biblical episodes—including the Binding of Isaac, Joseph in Egypt, and the death of Joab—from the perspective of their theatricality. In specific, I will examine the rhetoric and discourse of the poems both in comparison to the prose texts which inspired them and as performance pieces in their own right, and I will situate the poems in the context of Late Ancient theater more broadly.

More information about the international conference can be found at: http://www.sbl-site.org/meetings/Internationalmeeting.aspx