From the coming winter semester on, two visiting scientists from the USA will do research and teach at the Faculty of Theology of the University of Göttingen: Both Dr. Daniel Machiela from Hamilton (USA) and Dr. Jason Radine from Bethlehem (USA) will come to Göttingen within the framework of a Georg Forster Research Fellowship by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Moreover, four scholarship holders of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) are visiting the Department of Old Testament Studies. Dr. Andrea Ravasco from Genoa (Italy) and Dr. Jennifer Barbour from Oxford (Great Britain) have been granted a research fellowship; Matthew Jeremy Lynch from Pennsylvania (USA) and Ali Elrfaay from Cairo (Egypt) a doctoral fellowship.

Dr. Daniel Machiela is belonging to the Department of Religious Studies at the McMaster University Hamilton, Ontario; for eight months, from December 2011 on, he will do research in Göttingen on the Dead Sea Scrolls in cooperation with Prof. Reinhard Gregor Kratz from the Department of Old Testament Studies. It is planned to publish an introduction, in two volumes, to the corpus of the Aramaic texts from Qumran.

Dr. Andrea Ravasco from the University of Genoa – also in cooperation with Prof. Kratz and his team – is going to do research for one year on the textual criticism of the Books of Samuel and the contributions of the Dead Sea Scrolls to this problem. Both the Department of Qumran Research of the Theology Faculty as well as the long-term project ‘Qumran Lexicon’, which is attached to the Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Göttingen, are offering ideal conditions for this research.

A three year doctoral fellowship has been granted to Ali Elrfaay from the Department of Semitic Studies and the Faculty of Arts at the University of Cairo. He is writing on the reconstruction of the history of Israel in the work of the Jewish academic Yehezkiel Kaufmann and is a guest member of the DFG Research Training Group ‘Götterbilder – Gottesbilder – Weltbilder’ at the University of Göttingen.

The Old Testament scholar Dr. Jason Radine from the Department of Religion at the Moravian College in Pennsylvania is assisted by Prof. Hermann Spieckermann and, for nine months, from December 2011 on, will work on a project on the emergence of the Prophetic Books. Likewise, the ten month research stay of Matthew Jeremy Lynch from the Emory University in Atlanta is supervised by Prof. Spieckermann. His research topic is the role of the Jerusalem Temple in the cult as well as the early Jewish monotheism.

Dr. Jennifer Barbour is writing on idolatry in Old Testament texts. She did her doctorate in Oxford on Qohelet and has been teaching at the Harvard Divinity School in the last year. Dr. Barbour will conduct her research in cooperation with the Sofja-Kovalevskaja Research Group ‘Early Jewish Monotheisms’, which is headed by Dr. Nathan McDonald.

Contact details:
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Faculty of Theology – Department of Old Testament Studies
Platz der Göttinger Sieben 2, 37073 Göttingen
Phone (+49 551) 39-7130, Fax (+49 551) 39-22228