Early Career Network & Translation Lab

Participation in the Early Career Researchers program provides a unique platform for professional and intellectual growth. Participants present their work to an audience of scholars in the Renewed Philology network which offers high-level feedback as well as visibility. In this curated group of early career scholars from around the world the program offers a fostering a collaborative space for intellectual exchange and a rigorous workshop environment to test out and refine ideas before publication.

Affiliated Researchers present their work in one online Renewed Philology meeting session during the academic year as well as attend the workshops of fellow cohort members to provide feedback and engage with the group’s main theoretical inquiries.

Translation Lab

Submit project proposals and translation drafts for network review.

Translation Lab Submission Form →

2026–2027 Cohort


Karina Atudosie is a DPhil Candidate at the University of Oxford, researching constructions and presentations of queenship in the Hebrew Bible under the supervision of Dr. Laura Quick and Prof. Katherine Southwood. Her interdisciplinary work bridges traditional historical-critical approaches to the biblical text with comparative insights from ancient Near Eastern sources, integrating socio-anthropological methodologies related to ritual, dress, and gender. Currently in the final stages of her doctoral thesis, “Queens beyond Kings: Interpreting Biblical Royal Women in Light of Enthronement, Gender, and Ritual,” she will begin a postdoctoral project in October that builds on this expertise while opening a new research direction. This upcoming project will examine the presence of the female gaze in the Hebrew Bible, focusing on the interlinked rhetorics of visuality, gender, and embodiment as expressed through the philology of various biblical texts.


Jeffrey Cross (PhD University of Minnesota, 2024) is a scholar of the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism whose research critically examines the intellectual frameworks governing philological practice, focusing on recovering ancient categories and values. He is currently finishing his first book, Out of Many, One: Scribal Composition, Rewriting, and Literary Artistry in the Qumran Cave 1 Rule Scroll (1QS-1QSa-1QSb), which will offer a new interpretation of the famous Cave 1 Rule Scroll that understands its three constituent texts as a single composite work rather than three distinct compositions. His second book, provisionally titled Divine Causality and Human Agency in Ancient Judaism: Beyond Apocalyptic Determinism, challenges the traditional scholarly category of "apocalyptic determinism." The project demonstrates how this inherited framework relies on anachronistic post-Reformation assumptions, which flatten conceptual distinctions within apocalyptic texts and obscure how these themes operate across broader ancient Jewish literature. Concurrently, he conducts close philological analyses of lexical choices, grammatical constructions, and rhetorical strategies across representative texts to reconstruct an accurate typology of how ancient authors conceptualized divine causality and human agency.


Lola Graziani is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge researching late medieval Hebrew grammar. Her work focuses on the field's conceptual departure from traditional Judaeo-Arabic approaches toward a reinterpretation of grammar as a scientific discipline—a transition that drove significant shifts in grammatical theory, methodology, and terminology. Because this movement developed contemporaneously with Humanist interest in Hebrew, her research provides a critical framework for understanding the advent of Christian Hebraism and the early modern reception of Jewish literature in European academic practices. Aligning with the methodological commitments of the Renewed Philology initiative, Lola’s work critically examines the intellectual frameworks that govern philological practice. She investigates philology as a historical academic tradition, analyzing its role in the "scientification" of religious disciplines and structural position mediating between received and receiving cultures.


Ki-Eun Jang is an Assistant Professor at Fordham University whose research is grounded in the historical-critical study of the Hebrew Bible and cognate literature. Her work engages critically with the genealogies of biblical scholarship, alongside the broader humanities and social sciences, to interrogate the modern assumptions shaping the interpretation of ancient texts. Structurally, her research examines both the ancient West Asian social worlds that produced the Hebrew Bible and the intellectual legacies of Western modernity that continue to frame its interpretation. In her forthcoming book, Contesting Labeled Identities: The Sociology of Gentilics in Biblical and Northwest Semitic Literature, Jang examines how identity labels are claimed, unclaimed, and reclaimed in the ancient literary milieu. By focusing on the philological category conventionally termed "gentilics" across ancient Semitic and Egyptian sources, she traces both the ancient logic of identification and the modern conceptual history of race and ethnicity. This analysis uncovers how paradigms shaped by the Barthian model of ethnic groups and boundaries have historically informed biblical scholarship. A second book project extends this inquiry into the shifting registers of Canaanite identity, rethinking the origins of the Other and the interpretive epistemologies generated by that category. Jang’s meta-critical and interdisciplinary approach directly aligns with the methodological commitments of the Renewed Philology initiative, reflecting critically on the history of ideas underlying philological practice.


Anja Marschall is a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Ruhr-University Bochum. She earned her PhD under the supervision of Prof. Andreas Schüle at the University of Leipzig in 2023. Her dissertation, “Lament as Expression and Appropriation in the Psalms and the Book of Job” (Klage als Ausdruck und Aneignung in den Psalmen und im Hiobbuch), examines the transformative potential of lament texts in the Hebrew Bible as a means of engaging with God amid an existential crisis. Through the analysis of selected psalms of complaint and lament within the Book of Job, the study illustrates how these texts establish a space in which the human-divine relationship is both contested and reimagined. In the act of lamenting, the fragmentation of identity and the experience of divine absence serve as catalysts for protest and reflection, thereby fostering new avenues for thought and action. Her current postdoctoral project, titled “By the Hand of a Woman” – Female Agency at the Intersection of Sexuality, Violence, and Creativity, investigates the role of female hands as agents within the Hebrew Bible and the Apocrypha. Her research concentrates on the literary history, theology, and anthropology of the Old Testament, and her interests encompass the body, emotion, and human creativity within the Hebrew Bible. Her dedication is directed towards texts that defy simplistic interpretation and possess complexity capable of challenging and fostering innovation, both within existing research paradigms and academic instruction. Accordingly, she undertakes foundational research in dialogue with contemporary biblical studies, ancient Near Eastern studies, and interdisciplinary scholarship, while consistently aiming to articulate and communicate her findings in relation to current issues.


Lauren K. McCormick is a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University in the Center for Culture, Society, and Religion, and works with written and visual sources from the biblical world. She uses emergent imaging technology to detect and reconstruct paint on ancient artifacts, increasing the data through which they may be analyzed. Dr. McCormick is currently building for the Badè Museum of Biblical Archaeology a web exhibit of one Judean Pillar Figurine that she recolorized using Reflectance Transformation Imaging and Decorrelation Stretch Imaging. In her publications, Dr. McCormick investigates the petrography, manufacture, and typology of figurines from Tell en-Naṣbeh (biblical Mizpah), and explores paint as a fourth dimension of sculpture. She is currently co-editing a volume with Elizabeth Knott entitled "Ambiguity in the Ancient Near East: Material Records, Mental Constructs, and their Interpretations". McCormick earned her PhD in religious studies from Syracuse University in 2023, after obtaining a Bachelor's degree from Rutgers University and Master's degrees from New York University and Duke University. Her dissertation ("My Eyes Are Up Here: Guardian Iconography of the Judean Pillar Figurine") won a university-wide award for excellence and creativity in research. She has been a visiting scholar at various museums and is a member of "Digging Up Data", a mentorship program aimed at data literacy.


Ludwig Noya is Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible at Brite Divinity School. Noya received his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in 2024, and his first monograph reexamines the Sabbath transgression narratives in the Hebrew Bible in dialogue with Sabbath experiences of the enslaved and colonized persons in antebellum North America and British Colonial Global South, as well as the ancient imperial labor system. This monograph is currently under contract with Oxford University Press. In addition to this project, Noya’s coedited volume (with Matthew J.M. Coomber of St. Ambrose University) on Class, Hebrew Bible, and Intersectionality is forthcoming, and he is preparing another coedited volume on “rest” in ancient Jewish and early Christian contexts with Seth A. Bledsoe of Radboud University Nijmegen. For his second monograph, Noya explores the Sabbatical traditions related to “foreigners” within legal and prophetic traditions in dialogue with the intersection of Sunday laws and early Chinese and Mexican migrant laborers in the nineteenth-century United States, as well as the roles of foreign laborers in the ancient Near East.


Addison Scheivelbein is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford working on a dissertation entitled "Texts of Male Terror: Rethinking Masculinity in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond." Her research explores how modern conceptions of masculinity both shape and are shaped by the narratives of masculine figures in the Hebrew Bible, such as David and his sons, Absalom and Amnon. Utilizing interdisciplinary frameworks—including Sara Ahmed’s concept of "sticky affect" and Eve Sedgwick’s "touching feeling"—she examines the diachronic relationship between readers and biblical texts. In this approach, the biblical text is understood not merely as an isolated document, but as a composite of the traditions, narratives, and interpretations transmitted over time. Her work places both traditional historical-critical and modern methodologies under critical scrutiny to interrogate their purpose and significance, structurally analyzing instead how a new kind of "text" is generated when modern readers project their own contextual concerns onto the material.


Aron Tillema is Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible at Moravian University School of Theology. His research draws together philological analysis, socioeconomic history, and ethnographic approaches to the Hebrew Bible. His current book project, Reading Jonah Otherwise: Indeterminacy, Identity, and the Social Uses of Scripture, argues that the Book of Jonah’s textual gaps, subverted commands, and imagined geographies are intentional literary strategies that invite reflection on urgent questions of belonging and power. Drawing on recently published Babylonian archival material from the Āl-Yāḫūdu and Murašû corpora alongside ethnographic interviews with Jewish and Christian congregations in the United States, the project attempts a trans-temporal, interdisciplinary approach to biblical texts as dynamic cultural resources. Tillema’s philological and reception-historical work extends beyond Jonah and into wisdom literature. His article “Gendered Lament, Gendered Response: Reading Lamentations with Its Early Interpreters,” published in the Journal of Biblical Literature (2024) and winner of the Baron Essay Prize from the Western Jewish Studies Association, exemplifies his method of reading ancient texts in relation to their interpretive “afterlives.” He is also volume editor of Lamentations in the Themes and Issues in Biblical Studies series (Equinox Publishing) and a Steering Committee Member of the Writings Section of the International Society of Biblical Literature.


Samantha Rainford is a PhD candidate in the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World NYU. Her dissertation is entitled “Stranger than Fiction: Legal Gender, Inheritance, and Worldmaking in the Ancient Near East." Her research places cuneiform legal documents in dialogue with biblical literature to examine how juridical terminology, legal formulae, scribal practices, and legal gender illuminate broader ancient West Asian modes of social and legal thought. She is particularly interested in the structural ways legal and textual traditions construct and negotiate social categories through language, alongside the role of scribal practice in strategies of cultural worldmaking. Emphasizing comparative and integrative approaches to philology across textual genres, languages, and cultural milieus, Rainford’s work demonstrates how language shapes the social and intellectual worlds that both reflect and constitute biblical and cuneiform traditions alike.

Pilot Cohort (2025–2026)


Hannah Bash is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford, under the supervision of Laura Quick and John Screnock. Her dissertation offers the first full-scale analysis of the interplay of materiality, orality, and poetry in ancient Northwest Semitic poetic texts. As an interdisciplinary thesis, it investigates different material aspects of text-production and transmission as part of its wider exploration of the interrelationship between writing, materiality, and orality in a comparative range of Northwest Semitic texts. The project encompasses a range of texts from the Hebrew Bible and wider Northwest Semitic world, including the Deir ˁAlla Plaster Inscriptions, the Ugaritic funerary ritual KTU 1.161, the Priestly Blessing found in Numbers 6 and the Ketef Hinnom amulets, and Psalm 91. Hannah's research draws on methods from oral theory and material culture studies, and her research interests include the study of poetics, performance, memory, literary traditions, writing practice, and composition history. She seeks to re-examine Northwest Semitic textual strategies with reference to the boundaries between text production and transmission. Hannah has presented on aspects of her research at the Old Testament Society at the University of Göttingen, the VIEWS Project at the University of Cambridge, and the University of Oxford.


Emily Branton is a PhD candidate in Hebrew Bible at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, and a Visiting Instructor in Jewish Studies at Mount Holyoke College. Her research explores ancient Near Eastern theories of speech and cognition. Her dissertation, “Words that Stand: Efficacious Speech in Ancient Israel,” analyzes the conceptual metaphors used to represent speech acts in Biblical Hebrew, and in doing so also argues for the utility of conceptual metaphor theory as a critical philological tool. A case study from this dissertation was recently published in Vetus Testamentum as an article titled “What’s In A Name: The Fulfillment Metaphor in Biblical Hebrew.” She held an Educational and Cultural Affairs Junior Research Fellowship at the Albright Institute for Archaeological Research in Jerusalem (2023-2024), and was the 2022-2023 Dissertation Fellow at the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies.


Ellen De Doncker is a postdoctoral researcher at the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain, Belgium). She obtained her PhD under the direction of Prof. Hans Ausloos from UCLouvain in April 2025. Her dissertation, “A Human God? A Comparative Analysis of Anthropomorphisms in the Hebrew and Greek Pentateuch,” offers a study of the transformation of anthropomorphic language across the Hebrew and Greek textual traditions of the Pentateuch. Her research interests include Old Testament anthropology, metaphor theory, sensory perception in ancient texts, and Septuagint studies. She has furthermore contributed to several interdisciplinary research projects, including “Une deuxième peau à vif: vêtement, genre et violence dans la Bible hébraïque” (Université de Montréal), which explored gendered violence through textiles in the Hebrew Bible; and “Modernity and Holocaust in Lithuania: Philosophical Analysis of Moral Dilemmas” (University of Vilnius), focusing on ethical reflection and post-Holocaust theology. She was a visiting researcher at UCLA’s NELC department in the winter of 2024, where she studied with Prof. William Schniedewind. Her own PhD research, “A Human God?” was fully funded by the Belgian F.R.S.–FNRS and was embedded in the research group “Septante et critique textuelle” at UCLouvain.


Molly Drake is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford, under the supervision of Laura Quick and Katherine Southwood. Her project focuses on the materiality of Judean Pillar Figurines [JPFs]. These are humanoid figurines in the shape of women which have been recovered from ancient Judah, dated to the 8th-6th centuries BCE. She critiques present scholarship, which fixates on the iconographic nudity of the figurines and concludes from this alone that they represent a goddess, fertility, or lactation. Her project takes a materialist approach to the figurines, looking at how clay is understood in the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East. Clay’s association with creation, decay, and life cycles will bring a fresh perspective to the questions surrounding the JPFs' significance and function. Her research interests include biblical studies, popular religion, and feminist studies.


Yannik Ehmer is a post-doctoral researcher at the Humboldt University of Berlin in Hebrew Bible. Their dissertation “Knotted Knowledge - New Perspectives on the Poetics and Composition of Prov 10:1-22:16" was awarded summa cum laude in 2025. They have studied philosophy, mathematics and Protestant theology in Berlin, Edinburgh and Seoul, and most recently held appointments as visiting doctoral researcher at Yale Divinity School and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Their main research interests include biblical theology and philosophy with a focus on wisdom literature, phenomenology, postmodern hermeneutics(s) and epistemologies, the intersections between aesthetics and ethics, and queer studies and gender studies and their relationship to theology and philosophy.


Rachel Frish is faculty at Bar Ilan University. She is a former postdoctoral fellow at Yale Divinity School under the supervision of Jacqueline Vayntrub. Her main research interests include prophetic literature and biblical and post-biblical wisdom literature. Frish explores the development of traditions and worldviews from the Bible through Tannaitic literature and early Christianity. She seeks to define the core ideas that characterize the biblical traditions as well as their unique developments in the various literary works, tracing their theological range and later developments. Frish’s research combines a range of methodological approaches, including philological-historical, literary, biblical semantics and comparative analysis to Ancient Near Eastern cultures. Frish’s dissertation, completed in 2021 at Bar Ilan University and titled Wisdom Sayings in the Book of Jeremiah, discusses the nexus of wisdom and prophetic traditions in the book of Jeremiah, examined how these traditions influenced each other and pointed out the implications on the development of wisdom tradition and texts. Her current research focuses on the source of wisdom in biblical and post-biblical works. Access her publications here.


David A. Hannan is a Ph.D. Student in Hebrew Bible at Harvard University where he also serves as the graduate coordinator for Harvard’s Hebrew Bible Workshop. He has recently published a note in Nouvelles Assyriologiques Brèves et Utilitaires (N.A.B.U.) and an article in Vetus Testamentum entitled “Seen from Afar: Genesis 22:4 in Comparative Perspective.” His research interests include warfare rituals such as plunder, the literary representation of violence, the Deuteronomistic History and its formation, the history of Israelite religion, royal ideology, historiography, (meta)textuality, horror theory, and the comparative method. His dissertation will likely examine the redactional development of plunder texts and the shifting discourses around plunder across various corpora that comprise the Hebrew Bible. You can access his publications here.


Jenna Kemp is a lecturer at UC Berkeley in Hebrew Bible, and formerly a postdoctoral fellow at Universität Basel. Her research interests focus on socio-literary approaches to the formation of the Hebrew Bible as she examines the entanglement of textual production and interpretation. Kemp received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2021 and recently published her first book, Forgetting to Remember: Cultural Memory, Intertextuality, and Scribal Agency in the Hebrew Bible, which is available open access by Mohr-Siebeck. The book examines the Bible as a cultural object and analyzes the detectable text formation practices therein (e.g. redaction, additions, etc.) as acts of cultural memory. Her main interest in doing so is to situate cultural memory as a process that can account for the transmission of cultural objects over time. Forgetting, she argues, functions as a key element in this process and in the formation of cultural symbols as sites of memory. In her work broadly, she blends philological approaches to the Bible with theoretical approaches to historiography, cultural memory, and literary culture. Her next project approaches the theme of mass annihilation in the book of Joshua. She seeks to understand how the memory of these fictive events are transformed not only in the composition of Joshua itself, but also in early interpretive communities.


Victor Knight is a PhD candidate in Hebrew Bible and Teaching Fellow at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His work focuses on conceptions of deity and divine embodiment in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near East, Ancient Near Eastern iconography, and NW Semitic literature and religion. His dissertation, “Beyond Typology: Divine Identity and Materiality in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near East,” argues for an inherent, decentralized breadth of persona and body for deities in the Ancient Near East. In conversation with Deleuzian assemblage theory and theories of embodiment, his project also constitutes a meta-critical reexamination of the influences on and dominant paradigms behind contemporary descriptive schemata for ancient near eastern gods and goddesses.


Theodore Motzkin is a PhD student in Hebrew Bible at Harvard University, through the Committee on the Study of Religion. His research interests include the Hebrew Bible in both its ancient Near Eastern context and its communities of redaction and reception in the Second Temple period; Assyriology; Rabbinics; and ancient Greek religion and literature. His dissertation project will likely focus on Temple theology, cult, and embodied senses in Persian Yehud and the Second Temple, as well as parallel (and not so parallel) phenomena in Mesopotamia and the Greek world. In addition, Theo is co-chair of Harvard's Jewish Studies Workshop.

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Affiliated Early Career Researchers