Current visitors

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.

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.

Aaron Hughes

Aaron W. Hughes is the Philip S. Bernstein Professor in the Department of Religion and Classics at the University of Rochester, where he also directs the Center for Jewish Studies. He is the author of sixteen books, twelve edited volumes, and over eighty articles and book chapters. He is also the co-editor of the 20-volume Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophy. Books titles include The Texture of the Divine: Imagination in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Thought (2004); Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History (2012); Jacob Neusner: An American Jewish Iconoclast (2016); and Shared Identities: Medieval and Modern Imaginings of Judeo-Islam (2017).

His time at Oxford is supported by a fellowship by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), where he will work on a project tentatively titled “Silent History: Judaism on the Arabian Peninsula at the time of Muhammad.”

Danielle Drori

Danielle Drori completed her PhD in Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University in 2018. Her research focuses on the ties between literary translation and nationalism, bringing together contemporary theories of cultural transfer and the study of modern Hebrew literature. She is currently working on a project that explores the first Hebrew translations of Benjamin Disraeli’s work as part of a larger research project tentatively titled ‘Hebrew Victorians: Zionism in Translation.’ She has taught at Tel Aviv University, New York University, the City College of New York, and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Her articles about world literature and Jewish language politics have been published in the journals Prooftexts, Hebrew Higher Education, and PaRDeS, and she occasionally contributes to the Los Angeles Review of Books.