Alexander Samely

Link: Centre for Jewish Studies

Office Hours Tuesdays 3–4 and Wednesdays 11–12.

MA in Philosophy Frankfurt 1985, MSt in Jewish Studies in the Graeco-Roman Period Oxford 1984, DPhil Oriental Studies (Targums) Oxford 1989. I led a major AHRC project on the "Typology of Pseudepigraphic and Anonymous Jewish Literature c.200 BCE to 700 CE" between 2007 and 2012. It produced a new approach to the description of ancient Jewish literature, the so-called Manchester-Durham Inventory.

See for the Manchester-Durham Inventory of literary description online (as html):

http://www.otherliteratures.co.uk/inventory/1.html 

For more than 200 ancient Jewish works profiled according to the Inventory and linked through the databse, see: http://literarydatabase.humanities.manchester.ac.uk.

And for a description of the project, see : http://www.manchester.ac.uk/ancientjewishliterature/

• Literary structures in ancient Jewish literature, including biblical and talmudic literature
• Ancient Jewish Bible interpretation, including Midrash, Targum, Pesher and Re-Written Scripture
• The legal discourse of talmudic literature
• The philosophical thought of Spinoza, Husserl, Rosenzweig, Buber and Levinas
• Theories of Reading
• Hebrew Manuscripts
• The Phenomenology of Reading

I am an editor of the monograph series Studia Judaica published by Walter de Gruyter (Berlin), together with Charlotte Fonrobert (Stanford), Elisabeth Hollender (Frankfurt), Günter Stemberger (Vienna) and Irene Zwiep (Amsterdam).