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Gantt Gurley is the new Program Director for Judaic Studies

The Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies is happy to announce that Professor Gantt Gurley of the German and Scandinavian department will serve as the Director of the Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies at the University of Oregon for the next three years.

Professor Gurley is an Associate Professor of Scandinavian who has served on the Judaic Studies Executive Committee for several years and is well acquainted with colleagues and students in Judaic Studies. His recent book, Meïr Aaron Goldschmidt and the Poetics of Jewish Fiction, examines one of Denmark’s greatest nationalistic writers as first and foremost a Jewish artist, exploring his relationship to the Hebrew Bible and later Rabbinical traditions such as the Talmud and the Midrash as a form of poetics. Professor Gurley is currently working on a joint project that is mapping the sudden appearance of Rabbinic tales in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century vernaculars in Northern Europe. A central aim of the project is to illuminate the mechanisms whereby Jewish thought is reawakened in the European consciousness. Before coming to UO, he lectured at the University of California at Berkeley’s Scandinavian Department and was a Harry Starr Fellow in Judaica at the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. He received his PhD in in 2007 from UC, Berkeley.

The program would also like to  thank Deborah Green for her service as Director of the Program for the past 7 years. She will be on Sabbatical in the coming year and will return to teaching in the 2018-19 academic year.