Professor Hindy Najman

My interest in Classics revolves around three central literary topics: pseudepigraphy, commentary and canon. These topics are central to the composition, authority and legacy of various collections of literature from antiquity –  both biblical and classical – and they have been central to my own research and teaching. My earliest publications were deeply engaged with pseudepigrahy, author function and collection. Since 2010, I have been working on a project which focuses on ancient and contemporary philological practices. This project returns us to a much earlier collaboration between biblicists and rabbinicists, and hellenists and latinists. Conversation among scholars across these corpora is essential for an understanding of practices of philology and reading in antiquity until the present day. My interests are comparative, but I am also focusing on what is shared between these traditions: cultural contexts, reading practices and a shared history of scholarship which begins in antiquity and runs through the history of scholarly practices from late antiquity to the present. I have been particularly focused in recent years on the intimate interaction between biblical and classical studies in the eighteenth and nineteenth century; a period that was formative for both disciplines. So, for example, understanding and problematizing presuppositions of text criticism, interrogation of source criticism and language of recovery of something pure, original or natural. Additionally, we have been putting ancient Jewish texts in conversation with their Greek and Latin contemporaries in order to achieve mutually illuminating discussions around genres, revelation, conceptions of time and of the formation of the soul. These research questions and projects are profoundly enriched by collaboration between Biblical Studies and Classics.