Georgiana Diana Apostica

Georgiana Diana Apostica is a PhD candidate in the Italian National PhD Programme in Religious Studies (DREST), FBK – University of Turin, since November 2024. Her research, supervised by Massimo Giuliani (University of Trento) and Ronit Irshai (Bar-Ilan University), explores the ethics of procreation and assisted reproductive technologies in Orthodox Judaism from a meta-halakhic and Orthodox feminist perspective. She graduated (MA) cum laude in Philosophy (University of Trento) and in Bioethics of Maternal-Infantile Age (LUMSA), and was a Visiting Research Fellow at Bar-Ilan University (2026) and a Visiting Student at the Pontifical Gregorian University (2025-2026) and at the Institute of Jewish Studies, University of Antwerp. She is a member of the European Association for Jewish Studies (EAJS).

PhD project

Doctoral research project within the National PhD Programme in Religious Studies (DREST). The dissertation examines how Orthodox Jewish communities, among the most intensive users of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs), engage with procreation beyond the question of halakhic permissibility. It argues that halakhic decision-making rests on undeclared theological values and, through a meta-halakhic approach, draws on midrashic, Kabbalistic, phenomenological and Orthodox feminist sources to articulate the meaning of procreation that legal discourse leaves unthematized. Its three chapters analyse halakhic authority and its gendered structure, map four thematic axes (procreation, infertility, sexuality, relationality) and engage with IVF, gamete donation and surrogacy, treating Orthodox women’s lived experience as theological testimony and their agency as constitutive of procreation.