Prof. Athalya Brenner holds a BA in Biblical Studies and English Language and Literature (University of Haifa), MA in Biblical Studies (Hebrew University), and PhD in Biblical Studies (department of Near Eastern Studies, University of Manchester, England). She is Professor Emerita of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Chair at the Universiteit van Amsterdam, The Netherlands; and currently in Biblical Studies, Department Department of Biblical Studies, Tel Aviv University, Israel. She has a honorary PhD (2002) from the University of Bonn, Germany. This year (2014) she serves as the Vice President of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL; http://sbl-site.org). She has worked in Israel, Europe, the US and Hong Kong; and has published widely in the fields of Semitic philology, feminist criticism, and literary and cultural analysis, and Early Judaism and its literatures, mainly as related to the Bible and its reception history across ages, places and religions. For more details of her scholarly activities see her Internet site, Athalya-Morah-leTorah.com.
Within the Biblia Arabica Project she will work on two research issues: 1. The links between the biblical stories about Abraham, Sarah and Hagar as they developed in their Jewish and Islamic afterlives through contacts and mutual dependencies, mainly as correlated to questions of territory; and 2. The development of the Islamic concepts on prophecy and list of prophets, from the biblical notions through the Qur’an and onwards, as reflected in literature of the first millennium CE. An additional task will be to support and enhance the visibility of the Project and its aims with international scholarly organizations, such as the SBL.
