Shayna Sheinfeld

Assistant Professor of Religion

CB 62
612-330-1348
sheinfel@augsburg.edu
https://shaynasheinfeld.hcommons.org/
Dr. Shayna Sheinfeld (she/her)

In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks states that “Multiculturalism compels educators to recognize the narrow boundaries that have shaped the way knowledge is shared in the classroom. It forces us all to recognize our complicity in accepting and perpetuating biases of any kind.” I believe that the liberal arts, and certainly the Religious Studies classroom, requires us to help students inhabit perspectives and appreciate worldviews that may be radically different from their own while also recognizing their own worldviews. I seek to inspire students to question the foundations of their knowledge, to challenge them to ask from where their presuppositions about the world and how it works derive, and to help them to understand why they privilege that knowledge over other outlooks and analyses. These questions lead as well to the consideration of power and the social, cultural, intellectual, religious, and political structures that are at play in human life.
My classes are predominantly focused on sacred texts from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In addition to teaching foundational concepts and theories, my approach in the classroom engages with primary sources and provides the skills to examine and identify interpretive lenses through traditional and active learning, high impact practices, and exposure to diverse voices. Guiding students through the process of how to employ critical thinking skills is essential in preparing them to become good scholars and citizens, and to help prepare them for future careers.

Research

My current project focuses on the women from the Herodian court in the first centuries BCE and CE. From better-known figures, such as Herodias and her daughter Salome (Matt 14:3–11, Mark 6:17–28, Luke 3:19–20), to the more obscure, such as Pheroras’s unnamed wife (Josephus, Ant. 17.41–43; War 1.571), the women of the Herodian dynasty have been given a bad reputation by ancient historians and scholars alike: they are manipulative and power-hungry; they gain their power through seduction and sex; and their only real power comes when they are submissive. In this project I reexamine these ancient accounts and their history of interpretation, centering these women and their stories over and above the men surrounding them.
Most recently, I published Jewish and Christian Women in the Ancient Mediterranean (Routledge, 2022), a co-authored textbook with Meredith JC Warren and Sara Parks. This book won the 2023 Frank W. Beare Award from the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies.
I also work on the afterlives of biblical and apocryphal narratives, such as my recent article on “The Old Gods Are Fighting Back: Mono- and Polytheistic Tensions in Battlestar Galactica and Jewish Biblical Interpretation” (JIBS 2021) and the edited volume Theology and Westworld (Lexington/Fortress 2020), with Juli Gittinger, which explores the various intersections of religion and the first two seasons of the HBO series Westworld.

Education

  • B.A., DePaul University, Chicago, IL (Religious Studies)
  • M.T.S., Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, MA (Scripture & Interpretation; Jewish Studies)
  • Ph.D., McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada (Ancient Judaism)

Select Publications

Select Public Scholarship

Courses Taught

  • Religion, Vocation, and the Search for Meaning
  • The Bible and Its Interpreters
  • Creation and Destruction in the Bible and Beyond
  • Apocalypse Now and Then
  • Jesus and his Interpreters
  • Judaism
  • Sex, Gender, and the Bible