By Shelby Gill
As Laura Lieber (B.A. English, with minors in Classics and social work, summa cum laude, ’94) packs for her international move to Regensburg, Germany, she thinks about one box that has followed her across the country.
“It’s a box with coursework from my honors seminars at the U of A,” she laughs. “It’s amazing they demanded this kind of work from undergraduates.”
Lieber took the box from her parent’s home in Fayetteville when she began her first faculty appointment teaching classics and religion at Middlebury College in Vermont. From there, Lieber and the treasure trove of honors memorabilia moved to North Carolina, where she became a professor of late ancient Judaism at Duke University and, soon after, the director of the Duke Center for Jewish Studies. Now, the box will follow her across the Atlantic Ocean to her next appointment as a professor of transregional history of religions at the University of Regensburg.
“The summer before I started teaching, I took those papers with me,” she recalls reviewing the structure of syllabi, composition of assignments and thoughtful feedback scrawled on papers. “It’s not just because my mother wanted these things out of her house. In my position at Middlebury, really good teaching was an essential part of the job. I was aware of the fact I’d had really good teachers at the U of A.”
Lieber’s primary research area is religious poetry, “the public face” of rabbinic literature and biblical interpretations from Late Antiquity and the Byzantine period. She has published in numerous journals and authored five books. Her most recent publication Staging the Sacred: Performance in Late Ancient Liturgical Poetry (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023) examines the importance of Christian, Jewish and Samaritan liturgical poetry through the lenses of performance, entertainment and spectacle.
Born into a family of professors, Lieber knew she liked research, but her experience as a Sturgis Fellow and writing her honors thesis on the figure of Lilith in Jewish folklore deepened her focus.
“I had an intense interest in Judaism,” Lieber noted her interest in incantation bowls and Kabbalistic texts. “I didn’t have any Hebrew or the academic background to study those texts in graduate school.”
With guidance from Daniel Levine, a University Professor of classical studies, Lieber applied to rabbinical school at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, allowing her to learn ancient and modern Hebrew, Aramaic and other Near-Eastern languages.
“I was delighted when she chose classical studies, and then followed her interest in the ancient world by choosing Lilith as her honors thesis topic,” Levine said, noting that Lieber’s interest in the Near East was sparked when she attended his Hebrew class as a child at Temple Shalom. There, she learned about the flood narrative in the Epic of Gilgamesh and wanted to learn more.
“I supported her desire to apply to Hebrew Union College for her rabbinical studies not only because it was an institution worthy of her talents, but also because I had had family connections there – my grandfather was a professor of Bible there for sixty years, and it is where my father obtained his rabbinical ordination,” he added. “As a result, I consider Laura to be part of my family.”
Lieber spent a “language-intensive” year in Israel, which led her to write a thesis on dialect switching in the Book of Judges. From there, she went to the University of Chicago to pursue a doctorate in the history of Judaism and penned a dissertation on the exegesis of the Song of Songs in Late Antique and medieval Hebrew poetry.
“I wanted to study the way ancient mythological motifs persisted in rabbinic literature, and in a way, that’s what my undergraduate thesis was about too,” she noted. “Every now and then I look back at my thesis and realize it has stood the test of time. It’s very much written by a 22 year old, but it is still something I am proud of.”
Lieber chose the U of A for her undergrad because she received one of the five competitive Sturgis Fellowships, the only scholarship of that caliber offered at the time. She was a part of the fifth cohort, along with current faculty member Kathleen Condray, Professor of German and co-director of the International Engineering Program.
“Taking part in the Honors program, and now the Honors College, has always been as much about interacting with and being challenged by your intellectually interesting peers as by the coursework and professors,” Condray noted. “With Laura, there was an equal chance you could end up in a discussion about Seneca, an alternative rock band you had never heard of, an obscure figure from Jewish folklore or combating tuberculosis in New York, and yet somehow every conversation was delightful, whether the topic was silly or serious.”
The fellowship gave Lieber the community and financial freedom to live in the honors dorm, complete an urban studies semester in New York at the United Nations, and explore her interests in English, classics, and social work. She loved her independence but fondly remembered the ritual of bringing a group of friends to her parents’ house every Saturday for a homecooked meal and to watch Star Trek.
Now as tenured faculty herself, Lieber reminisces about writing a first draft of an essay in college and crossing her fingers that she wouldn’t be required to “turn in a second.”
“I remember thinking maybe this draft will be so awesome that I’ll just be done,” she said. “It never happened because there is always room to improve. I look back at the box of coursework – the feedback faculty gave me, and I am reminded of the responsibility of being a teacher. It’s an important talisman to me.”
Lieber feels shaped by her family and the faculty she encountered over her storied career, and she jokes that being a professor takes people who are “bookish by nature and makes them perform for a living.”
In her next chapter, Lieber is moving to Europe and embarking on a new role and concentration at the University of Regensberg. Her position is built on collaboration with faculty worldwide, bringing people together through research grants, conferences and working groups.
“I always felt that if you got the Sturgis Fellowship, it was your opportunity—even responsibility—to see everything,” Lieber said with a smile. “It’s part of the deal of being a Sturgis, and I’m still trying to do that.”
1992 / Lieber and Jason Blackard in Gladson Ripley Hall.
1993 / During her junior year, Lieber had the opportunity to meet Dr. Birgit Olsen, whom Daniel Levine invited from Denmark as a visiting professor of modern Greek folklore.
1994 / Group photo of Wesley Marshall, Louritha Green, Wendy King, Lieber, Kyle Harrison, Kathleen Condray and Collin Condray at graduation in 1994.
1994 / Lieber with her mother Claudia Bailey, professor emeritus, at an Honors reception.
1994 / Lieber, wearing a U of A Eta Sigma Phi t-shirt, stands in the Negev Desert in southern Israel during her “language-intensive” year of rabbinical school, during which she learned ancient and modern Hebrew and other ancient Near Eastern languages.
2003 / Lieber (right) at graduation from the University of Chicago in 2003 with Deborah Green, now a professor of the Hebrew Bible and Jewish studies at the University of Oregon.