We’ve moved to Berlin (May/June 2022) and I have started a new position as a researcher at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, in the Theologische Fakultät, working for an exciting new project at the cutting edge of comparative work in biblical studies and Egyptology called DEMBIB (“From Texts to Literature: Demotic Egyptian Papyri and the Formation of the Hebrew Bible”). Here’s the project website. Check out also my own website, esp. the “About” page, for a newly written overview of my intellectual interests and projects.

What’s happened over the past 9-10 months since my last post?

  • Moved to Berlin from the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I came in May 2022 to get started working and to look for a home for us. Theresa and the kids came later in June. We’ve found a very nice community on the outskirts of the city called Kleinmachnow. It has been an adjustment! We are very happy though. Our two girls (ages 9 and 6) are going to public school and are learning German. The baby is still at home. There’s so much to really love about living here. We are enjoying learning German, discovering Berlin, planning some European travels hopefully, eating lots of bread, cheap beer, cost-effective grocery shopping, easy bottle returns, safe and easy public transportation, healthcare, etc. Follow along on Instagram, I try to post once a week or so. We’ve had so much help in making this transition, from my parents and my inlaws especially, and from my new colleagues and friends here in Berlin, and many others. Wish us luck over the next four years!
  • As the new project got started in the summer and fall I gave presentations on my research at the 14th International Congress for Demotic Studies in Heidelberg, and at a workshop for our project in Paris at the College de France. Some more info can be found on my “talks” page.
  • My dissertation, “The Poetics of Plot in the Egyptian and Judean Novella,” was published online and can be read here. I hopefully expressed this haltingly well enough in my acknowledgments, but I owe such a huge debt of gratitude to my committee for seeing this through to the end, especially through the photo finish of getting it submitted in time to begin my job in Berlin.
  • Three short introductions which I wrote for the University of North Carolina Asheville and their excellent new humanities program readers are now available on my hcommons: The Epic of Gilgamesh, Egyptian love poetry, and The Teaching of Amenemeope. It was a real privilege to be involved with this and to teach and contribute from 2018-2020 to the program at UNCA.
  • I’ve added as much as I can to my website, including old syllabi, videos of me teaching, handouts, slides, etc.

What’s on the horizon, so far?

  • Currently working through peer review comments on an article for Manuscripts and Text Cultures on “Mouvance and the Storyteller’s Art in Manuscripts of a Demotic Novella.” This should hopefully be published later this year. I blogged about this paper when I presented it in early 2022 at the Early Text Cultures reading group of Queen’s College, Oxford. Stay tuned for the article!
  • 2023 European Association for Biblical Studies conference, Syracuse. I’m giving a paper with my colleage José Rafael Saade (a doctoral student on our Berlin project) at this year’s EABS conference, entitled “Egypt as Garden in the (Post-)Achaemenid Conceptualization of Space and History.”
  • In September 2023 our project will have its second international workshop at University College, Oxford.
  • I plan on attending the 2023 Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting in San Antonio in November.
  • My supervisor Bernd Schipper and my colleague Robert Kade and I are in the early stages of bringing together an edited volume for Routledge on Ancient Egypt and the Bible. I’ll be contributing to it on Demotic narrative literature and the Hebrew Bible, and on Egyptian magic.
  • A long-awaited and -finished chapter on “The Corpus of Northwest Semitic Texts in Egyptian Scripts” will be making its appearance eventually in Susan Hollis, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Egypt and the Hebrew Bible. I will share it as soon as I can.
  • And of course, lots of writing, including working on my first book, more on which as things get moving.

Some of you may know me from Twitter, but won’t find me there any longer unfortunately. You can follow me on Instagram (not a super common poster, but I try), here on the blog (will try to start using it regularly!), and, if I can get my act together enough, on Flickr as well for more photography (definitely an amateur). Still figuring out if I want to have another outlet for more personal writing and reflection, distinct from this blog which seems to be more professional. Stay tuned.

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