Pratima Gopalakrishnan is a scholar of late antique Jewish religion and history, who uses theoretical approaches drawn from feminist and queer theory, and slavery and labor studies. She works primarily with late antique rabbinic Jewish texts, as well as the textual and material artifacts of late antique and early medieval legal cultures and considers how ostensibly economic ancient discussions — of the household, the agricultural field, but also the laboring body itself —were always imbricated with the projects of defining religious, ethnic, and sexual difference.  Pratima received her Ph.D. from the Religious Studies Department at Yale University, where she wrote a dissertation titled “Domestic Labor and Marital Obligations in the Ancient Jewish Household.” She is currently the Perilman Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Duke Center for Jewish Studies.