Mroczek is an associate professor of religious studies, director of the Jewish Studies program, and Chancellor's Fellow at the
University of California, Davis.[1] She earned her PhD at the
University of Toronto, with a dissertation entitled Psalms Unbound: Ancient Concepts of Textual Tradition in 11QPsalms-a [a scroll of psalms from
Qumran] and Related Texts, investigating early Jewish communities' conceptualizations of the production and collection of writing.[2]
Mroczek's first monograph, The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity (
Oxford University Press, 2016), argues that modern concepts of the Bible and even of the book itself—which refer to texts that are generally stable, finalized and/or definitive—are inapplicable to the
Second Temple era of Judaism,[12][13][14][15] and that scholars of early Jewish texts and of ancient texts more generally should avoid employing anachronistic contemporary ideas of books and authorship.[16]
For this monograph, Mroczek won the 2017 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise and the 2017 George A. and Jean S. DeLong Book History Prize, and was a finalist for the
Association for Jewish Studies' Jordan Schnitzer Book Awards.[17][18][19] The book has been described as "field-changing",[16] "offer[ing] challenging insights into rethinking the significance of the literary imagination in the world of sacred writing and memory not only in Jewish Antiquity but also in our reading of religious texts and biblical interpretation",[15] presenting "a powerful new way of imagining early Jewish textuality",[12] and "break[ing] new ground in her expositions of key texts, carving out space for genuinely new and better understandings of Second Temple literary culture and thus early Judaism... an important monograph, one that all scholars of antiquity should read... because of its successful balancing of theoretical critiques and practical advances, the work will prove insightful for scholars of religious studies generally".[13]