Dr. Alessia Bellusci is a historian of Hebrew culture who specializes in medieval Jewish thought, manuscript culture, and intellectual history. Working at the intersection of history, religion and cultural anthropology, she studies the production and transmission of technical knowledge in pre-modern Judaism and the history of Jewish magic. After receiving a PhD from Tel Aviv University in 2017, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Library of Israel and was a Blaustein postdoctoral associate in medieval Jewish history and lecturer in religious studies at Yale University. She is currently a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fellow at Villa I Tatti - The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. Her dissertation and forthcoming book was awarded the Shai Bleimann recognition by the Middle East & Islamic Studies Association of Israel.

Selected publications:

Bellusci, Alessia.  Dream Requests in the Middle East: The History of the Sheʾelat Ḥalom from the Medieval Era back to Late Antiquity, forthcoming in the Brill series Magical and Religious Literature of Late Antiquity.

Bellusci, Alessia. “Jewish magic in the syncretic Renaissance: Baking a pizza for the Bogeyman,” forthcoming in I Tatti Studies, Spring Issue, 2021.

Bellusci, Alessia. “There once was a frog: A seventeenth century dried frog in ms. ROS 77,” forthcoming in Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, 15.3, Winter, 2021.

Bellusci, Alessia. “Immaginazione e modelli onirici tardo antichi nei frammenti magici della Genizah del Cairo,” Materia Giudaica 23 2018.  65–77.

Bellusci, Alessia. “Jewish Magia in Renaissance and Baroque Italy: Preliminary Notes on Ms. GFC 325,” in Cabbala. Cahiers d’Accademia 11, 2018. 23–42.

Bellusci, Alessia. “A Genizah finished product for She’elat Ḥalom based on Sefer Ha-Razim,” Journal of Jewish Studies 67.2 ,2016. 305–326.