Current visitors

Marcello Cattaneo

Marcello Cattaneo recently submitted his doctoral thesis, which he completed at the University of Oxford in the English Faculty, on the scholarly and polemical contexts of Jonathan Swift’s early satires. While studying such contexts, he developed interests in the history of biblical criticism in the seventeenth century, as well as in late seventeenth-century theological controversy, and the role of Hebrew scholarship in these fields. As a visiting fellow, he will focus on the English translation of part of the Mishnah in 1718.

Kirsten Macfarlane

Kirsten Macfarlane is a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. She completed her DPhil at Oxford in 2017 on the controversial English Hebraist Hugh Broughton (1549-1612). This thesis led her to explore various topics including early modern chronology, genealogy, biblical translation and exegesis (especially of the book of Daniel and Revelation), religious politics, controversial theology, the history of Hebrew printing in Europe, neo-Latin learned culture, and Jewish-Christian relations in the early modern period.

Her postdoctoral research to date has focussed on turning this work into a monograph, although she has also recently started a new project on the reception of European biblical criticism in colonial North America, enabled by Visiting Fellowships at the Houghton Library, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Her research interests more generally lie in the early modern study of Hebrew and Judaism by Reformed Protestant scholars, and to this end, while at the Centre, she will be examining the Amsterdam Hebraist Wilhelmus Surenhusius’ use of post-biblical Jewish sources in his work on the New Testament.

Omer Michaelis

Omer Michaelis is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. Previously, he was a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School and Harvard Standing Committee on Medieval Studies. He completed his PhD dissertation, on Crisis Discourse and the Dynamics of Tradition in Medieval Judaism,  at Tel Aviv University’s School of Philosophy.

Omer specializes in medieval Jewish thought and philosophy in the Islamicate world. He focuses on the production and integration of the new in medieval Judaism, particularly in the areas of Jewish philosophical, theological and legal discourses. His current research centers on the creative power of forgetting knowledge in Medieval Judaism.

He is a junior founding member of Tel Aviv University’s Center for Religious and Interreligious Studies, which is dedicated to the integrated study and teaching of the Jewish, Islamic, and Christian traditions. In Israel, he also headed a research group on Jewish Political Thinking at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, and served as a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and the Israel Democracy Institute.

Richard Cohen

Richard I. Cohen is the academic director of the Israel Center of Research Excellence (ICore) for the Study of Cultures of Place in the Modern Jewish World. Formerly the Paulette and Claude Kelman Chair in French Jewry Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in its department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry, his research interests have focused on the history of Jews in western and central Europe and on the interrelationship between art and society in the modern period. Among his publications: The Burden of Conscience. French-Jewish Leadership during the Holocaust; Jewish Icons. Art and Society in Modern Europe; he has co-curated and co-edited From Court Jews to the Rothschilds: Art, Patronage, and Power, 1600-1800 (The Jewish Museum, New York), and Le Juif Errant: Un témoin de temps (Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme, Paris). He edited and introduced Raymond-Raoul Lambert’s Diary of a Witness, 1940-1943 (Paris, Chicago, Jerusalem); Visualizing and Exhibiting Jewish Space and History (vol. 26 of Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Oxford University Press, New York), co-edited Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe (2014). He has recently edited vol. 30 of Studies in Contemporary Jewry on Place in Modern Jewish Culture and Society (Oxford University Press, NY, 2018).

Yosef Kaplan

Yosef Kaplan

Yosef Kaplan is Bernard Cherrick Emeritus Professor of the History of the Jewish People at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His most recent publications include The Religious Cultures of Dutch Jewry (coedited with Dan Michman), Leiden and Boston 2017; Eros, Family and Community (coedited with Ruth Fine and others), Hildesheim, Zürich and New York 2018.  During his stay at Oxford, from January until June 2019, he will be working on a monography about Rabbi Jacob Abendana, the author of a Spanish translation of the Mishna.

Thomas Roebuck

Tom Roebuck’s research focusses on the scholars and scholarship of Renaissance and early-modern England (1580-1710), especially on the development of historical scholarship in England, the study of classical, biblical and Jewish texts, and the ways in which scholarship was shaped by complex religious and political commitments. He uses letters, notebooks, annotated printed books, and other original documents from archives around the world, to reconstruct the ways in which scholars of the past worked, thought and argued with one another. He is currently engaged in two large projects. One of them is an intellectual biography of the clerical scholar, orientalist, antiquary and non-juror, Thomas Smith (1638-1710). The other is an edition (to be published with Oxford University Press, and produced collaboratively with colleagues at the University of Georgetown and Montclair State University) of the Table Talk of the antiquary, oriental scholar and politician, John Selden (1584-1654). He has recently written essays on subjects including the editing of Josephus, the archaeological study of the near east in the late seventeenth century, and the 1695 revision of Camden’s Britannia, and is working on essays on the historical scholarship of the Elizabethan Archbishop, Matthew Parker (1504-1575), on the editing of medieval texts in 1590s England, on antiquarianism in the period 1640-1715, and on the drafting of William Camden’s Britannia (1586-1607); he has been engaged for a while in collecting and editing the unpublished letters of the classical scholar, Richard Bentley (1662-1742). He regularly presents his work at leading international conferences.

Jaclyn Granick

Jaclyn Granick completed her PhD in international history at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland in 2015 after reading Social Studies at Harvard as an undergraduate. She is currently working on a monograph, International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War based on her prize-winning doctoral research, which investigates American Jewish responses to Jewish suffering abroad from 1914-1929. As a Newton International Fellow of the British Academy, she is also beginning a new project on Jewish women’s internationalism and universalism in the long twentieth century.

Her research interests include interactions among transnational non-governmental organizations, states, and international organizations; religious internationalism; history and historiography of Jewish diplomacy and philanthropy; late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century institutional and diplomatic history in the United States and Europe; humanitarianism, human rights, and social reform.

Stefano Salemi

Stefano Salemi is Tutor in theology and biblical studies at the University of Oxford (Dep.Cont.Educ.), Associate Lecturer at Chichester University, UK, and at the International Centre for Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies (CAMNES, Italy). He completed his PhD in Theology and Biblical Studies (New Testament and Early Christianity, Pontifical Theological Faculty of Apulia, Italy), on the reception of the Passion Narrative in biblical exegesis, in Latin and Greek sources and in later theological developments, engaging with linguistics and re-readings of the Hebrew Bible. Research fellow and visiting scholar at Harvard, Yale, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, his recent project, funded at King’s College London, focuses on how the Hebrew terms used to express the symbolic dimension of prophetism in the MT of Ezekiel are rendered in the LXX and serve to construct its theological interpretation. His research interests include biblical hermeneutics and theology, lexicography and linguistics of Hebrew and Greek in exegesis, reception history, reformation and Adventist theology, narrative/rhetorical criticism.

Peter Bergamin

Peter Bergamin completed his DPhil in Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford in 2016, with a thesis that traced the ideological development of the pro-Fascist, Revisionist Zionist ideologue, Abba Ahimeir.  His research focuses on Maximalist-Revisionist Zionism, and Jewish anti-British resistance during the period of the Mandate for Palestine.  He is currently working on a monograph based on his doctoral thesis (The Makings of a Zionist Revolutionary: Abba Ahimeir’s Ideological Genesis, 1921-1934), as well as carrying out research for a new project that examines Britain’s decision to withdraw from Mandate Palestine, in 1947.  In the future, he hopes to combine his previous experience as a musician with his current research interests, in projects that will examine the effects of antisemitism on Gustav Mahler’s directorship of the Vienna Court Opera, and antisemitic characterisations in the operas of Richard Wagner.  In addition, he is a tutor for the Visiting Student Programme at Mansfield College, Oxford.

Aya Elyada

Aya Elyada (PhD 2010, Tel Aviv University) is Senior Lecturer at the Department of History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She spent five years as a visiting doctoral student at the University of Munich, Germany, and three years as a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University, NC. Her fields of interest are German and German-Jewish history and culture; Christian-Jewish relations; Yiddish language and literature; and the social and cultural history of language. Her publications include papers in the Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook (2008), Past and Present (2009), Zeitschrift für Religions-und Geistesgeschichte (2017), the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies (2017), and the Jewish Quarterly Review (2017). Her book, A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany, was published in 2012 by Stanford University Press. Her current book project discusses the cultural history of German translations from Yiddish from the mid-16th century and up to 1938.

Daniel Schumann

Daniel Schumann is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow with a project entitled “A New Methodology for Comparative Analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Cognate Literature”. He completed his PhD in Theology (New Testament and Ancient Judaism) at Münster University in 2018, with a thesis on vows in Ancient Judaism and Earliest Christianity that had a special focus on the possibilities and limits of making exegetical and historical use of Rabbinic texts in the course of elucidating traditions from the time of the Second Temple. In the future, he hopes to combine the outcomes of his PhD thesis and his postdoctoral project in a textbook on comparative work in the study of the New Testament and Ancient Judaism.

Yael Fisch

Yael Fisch submitted her PhD dissertation titled Paul’s Interpretation of Scripture and the Pre-History of Midrash at Tel Aviv University (2018). She is interested in scriptural interpretation in antiquity and in the history of hermeneutical methods (allegory, typology, pesher, midrash) and in the possibilities (and limitations) on using the Paul’s letters in the reconstructing early and under-documented Jewish interpretative traditions in the first century CE. She has also worked and published on parallel traditions between Josephus and the Rabbis. In her postdoctoral project, titled The Hermeneutics of Torah to the Gentiles: Scripture Beyond Ethnic Particularity, she intends to explore Jewish discourses from Alexandria and Judea/Palestine that think of scripture as addressing non-Jews as well as Jews, and the ways by which these discourses have reshaped Torah and its interpretative practices. Beyond a contribution to the field of scriptural interpretation, she intends the project to serve as a critical inquiry into the ancient Jewish roots of universalism.

Neta Bodner

Neta Bodner is a Rothschild ( Yad ha Nadiv) post-doctoral fellow. She received her PhD in 2016 from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in architectural history, focusing on medieval architecture. In 2016-2018 she was a post-doctoral fellow in the European Research Council project ‘Beyond the Elite: Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe’ headed by Prof. Elisheva Baumgarten where she studied Jewish ritual baths. Her current project is a comparative analysis of Jewish and Christian spaces for ritual immersion from the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries.

Chen Bar-Itzhak

Chen Bar-Itzhak completed her doctoral dissertation at the Department of Hebrew Literature, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, with periods of study at Harvard University’s Institute for World Literature at the University of Lisbon (2015) and at Harvard (2016). Her dissertation, which develops a new model for the study of literary cities, explores the city of Haifa in the Israeli cultural imagination from an interdisciplinary perspective.This project won her the Nathan Rotenstreich scholarship for outstanding doctoral students in the humanities. Her published/forthcoming articles (in English, Hebrew and Arabic), some of which have won prizes, address the topics of literary Haifa, Zionism and utopia, the reconstruction of place-identity through cultural memory, the poetics of Iraqi-Israeli writer Sami Michael, and the uses and abuses of literary theory in the field of World Literature.

She is currently working on two projects: the first, following her article “Intellectual Captivity: Literary Theory, World Literature and the Ethics of Interpretation” (forthcoming at the Journal of World Literature), aims to integrate concepts from Hebrew literary theory and thought into theories of World Literature. The second, based on parts of her dissertation, addresses local memory cultures as generators of counter-memory, focusing on the case-study of colonial nostalgia for British Mandate Haifa.

She is also the executive editor of Stanford University’s Dibur Literary Journal and a board member of the Association for Literary Urban Studies.

Katja Kujanpää

Katja Kujanpää is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Helsinki (Finland) and member of the Centre of Excellence Changes in Sacred Texts and Traditions (www.cstt.fi). She completed her ThD in New Testament Studies in 2018 (University of Helsinki). Her monograph The Rhetorical Functions of Scriptural Quotations in Romans: Paul’s Argumentation by Quotations, which is based on her doctoral dissertation, is published in Novum Testamentum Supplements. In her postdoctoral project Scriptures and Authority in the Identity Formation of Early Christians, Kujanpää examines early Christian writers’ use of Jewish scriptures, their views on scriptural authority, andconnections between power, identity and scriptural argumentation. In addition to these themes, her research interests include the Septuagint, Paul, and quotation studies.

Tuukka Kauhanen

Tuukka Kauhanen is and Academy of Finland Research Fellow in the University of Helsinki. He completed his PhD on The Proto-Lucianic Problem in 1 Samuel in 2011 and his second monograph on Lucifer of Cagliari and the Text of 1-2 Kings in 2018. Kauhanen has been the editor of 2 Samuel (2 Regnorum) for the Göttingen Septuaginta project since 2015. The edition project includes a reconstruction of an eclectic text and a full apparatus reporting all the meaningful variation in the ca. 60 Greek manuscripts as well as in secondary versions and early quotations. A part of the project involves noting all the existing remains of Origen’s Hexapla for that book in a separate apparatus.

Kauhanen’s other research interests include early reception of the Septuagint, Old Latin biblical translations, and the use of digital tools in editing and analysing biblical texts. He is a vice-team leader in the team “Text and Authority” in the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence “Changes in Sacred Texts and Traditions” [cstt.fi].