#  Sarah B. K. Greenberg 

Lecturer on Social Studies

 

 

 



   ![Sarah Greenberg headshot](/sites/g/files/omnuum9666/files/styles/hwp_4_5__320x400/public/2025-05/Greenberg%20poster.jpg?itok=zuzmyGbx) 

 



 

 location\_on William James Hall 306 

 email <sarahgreenberg@fas.harvard.edu> 

 



 

Sarah B. K. Greenberg is a Lecturer in Social Studies. Sarah held a 2022-2023 Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship for her scholarship on Jewish political thought. Sarah’s research seeks to carve out space for Jewish thought and thinkers — particularly the theological sources that have been sidelined or excluded – as Judaism occupies an often-marginal, not-quite-assimilated space in ‘Western’ political thought. Sarah’s first book project, “The Law is Not in Heaven”: Authority and Covenant in Jewish Political Thought, argues that Jewish conceptions of covenant provide resources for rethinking hegemonic conceptions of authority in the Western political tradition. Through a study of the works of Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, Hannah Arendt, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, all in dialogue with the Jewish textual canon, Sarah’s dissertation explores covenant as both a foundation for authority and a foundation for disobedience and dissent, and, thus, as an alternative to dominant understandings of both religious and political authority via a model of command and obedience.

Prior to graduate school, Sarah worked as a policy advocate in Washington, D.C., where she specialized in church-state law. Sarah received her B.A. *magna cum laude* in Government and French from Cornell University in 2013. And, in 2024, Sarah earned her Ph.D. in Government (Political Thought) from Cornell.



 

 

 





 

 

- ## Roles
    
     [Faculty and Teaching Staff](/roles/faculty)