Explore our faculty research areas to find a faculty mentor or expert who aligns with your area of interest.

Gantt Gurley

Gantt Gurley’s first monograph, "Meïr Aaron Goldschmidt and the Poetics of Jewish Fiction" (Syracuse University Press, 2016), offers a unique reading of one of Denmark’s great writers of the nineteenth century as first and foremost a Jewish artist. By offering an alternative to the nationalistic discourse so prevalent in the scholarship, the study examines Goldschmidt’s relationship to the Hebrew Bible and later Rabbinic traditions, such as the Talmud and the Midrash, and how these traditions served as agents in Goldschmidt’s formation of a new secular Jewish poetics. 

Gurley is currently working on his second book entitled, "The Legend of the Wandering Jew in Long Romanticism." This new book project examines the key innovators of the literary legend of the era known as Long Romanticism (1750-1850) across several national traditions: Danish, Norwegian, German, English, and American. Among the hundreds of different treatments of the Wandering Jew during this era, a handful of writers stand out for their striking contributions to the reimagining of the legend. For these writers, the Wandering Jew is more than a stock character or folkloric motif; he becomes the very spirit of literary imagination in all its forms. The essential characteristic of the Wandering Jew, his eternal displacement, makes him an ideal metonym for modernity’s constant, restless struggle against the constraints of literary, political, and religious establishments. This study offers both a broad comparative approach to the theme as well as arguments and readings that inform numerous other debates on the traditions and literary artists considered. My strong transnational perspective and the prominence of such figures as Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Percy Shelley, Hans Christian Andersen, Meïr Aaron Goldschmidt, and Nathaniel Hawthorne invite a broad and diverse audience to the book, whereas lesser-known writers such as B.S. Ingemann and Frederik Paludan-Müller stretch the project to the margins of Scandinavian canonicity.

Bassem Hosny

One of Bassem Hosny's research projects examines the stereotypical image of Arabs in modern Hebrew literature. The research also includes the development of the narrative style of two writers, Moshe Smilansky and Savyon Liebrecht, and the various influences on the development of Arab characters in their works. 

A second project examines Hebrew Philology following one of the notable Jewish grammarians of the Middle Ages, Rabbi Yona (Ibn Jinnah Al-Qurtubi). This project was divided into several stages: transliterating the Book of ALoma’ into Arabic script, then comparing it to the Hebrew version, clarifying the fundamental differences between the two versions, then correcting and verifying the sources and references in both versions, and lastly proving the extent to which Ibn Jinnah was influenced in his book by Arab books, especially Sibawayh, Al-Mubarrad, and others.