Ariel Evan Mayse, Director of Undergraduate Studies (DUS)

Ariel Evan Mayse joined the faculty of Stanford University in 2017 as an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies, after previously serving as the Director of Jewish Studies and Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern Jewish Thought at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts, and a research fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Michigan. Mayse holds a Ph.D. in Jewish Studies from Harvard University and rabbinic ordination from Beit Midrash Har’el in Israel. Mayse's research and teaching interests include: Hasidism, Kabbalah, and Jewish mysticism; comparative religious ethics and theology; ecology and the environmental humanities; medieval Jewish thought; and the philosophy of Jewish law. He is the author of Speaking Infinities: God and Language in the Teachings of Rabbi Dov Ber of Mezritsh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020; Hebrew translation, 2022); Laws of the Spirit: Ritual, Mysticism, and the Commandments in Early Hasidism (Stanford University Press, 2024; Hebrew translation, in progress); and Hasidism: Writings on Devotion, Community, and LIfe in the Modern World, with Sam Berrin Shonkoff (Brandeis University Press, 2020). His next project, As a Deep River Rises: Judaism, Ecology and Environmental Ethics, is under contract with Brandeis University Press, and he is currently working on a biography of the Baal Shem Tov for the Jewish Lives Series (Yale University Press).  

For his complete CV, see here; and to download many of his publications, see here.