November 2023 update
What’s there to say? My two oldest kids are pretty much fluent in German, and I’m still writing!
Here are some things which are finished and are set to appear next year:
- “Appearance and Reality in Setne’s Dialogue with ‘Pharaoh’ in First Setne 5.31-35,” in Aurore Motte and Victoria Almansa-Villatoro (eds.), (Im-)Politeness in Ancient Egyptian Texts (Brill, Studies in Pragmatics)
- “Finding God in Nineveh: A Case Study in Judean and Egyptian Literary Imagination,” Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel (a fascicle with contributions from DEMBIB project members)
- “Mouvance an the Art of Fiction in Performance in Manuscripts of a Demotic Novella,” Manuscript and Text Cultures
Also, as always, keep an eye out for “The Corpus of Northwest Semitic Texts in Egyptian Scripts” in the Oxford Handbook of Ancient Egypt and the Hebrew Bible, which will manifest itself one day.
What I’m writing now:
- A chapter on “The Book of Esther as Novella” for Helga Bezold and Kristin Joachimsen, eds., Esther: Themes and Issues (Equinox Themes and Issues in Biblical Studies)
- A written version of mine and José Rafael Saade’s paper “Egypt as Garden in the (Post-)Achaemenid Conceptualization of Space and History,” presented at this past year’s EABS meeting in Syracuse
- Two chapters for the Routledge Handbook of Ancient Egypt and the Hebrew Bible, which I am editing along with Bernd Schipper and Robert Kade. One on “Egyptian Magic and the Hebrew Bible,” and another co-authored with Jacqueline Jay on “Demotic Narrative Literature and the Hebrew Bible.”
- My first book.
I’ll be heading to San Antonio, TX for the 2023 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. I’m giving two papers there:
- “Philology as Leisure in the Novella of Ruth.” Session: Philology in Hebrew Studies, 11/18 from 1 to 3:30 pm, Presidio C (3rd floor), Grand Hyatt. Abstract.
- “Are All Texts Rivers? The Ending of MT Esther and the Multitextuality of Prose Fiction in the Hellenistic Period.” Session: Hebrew Scriptures and Cognate Literature, 11/19, 4 to 6:45 pm, 206A (Meeting Room level), San Antonio Convention Center. Abstract.
Not responsible for presentation deviation from abstract.
Had a pretty eventful year, including:
- Participated in the second international workshop of DEMBIB at University College, Oxford. Visited Marx’s grave.
- Travelled to hear some papers at the Hellenistic Workshop at the University of Groningen, saw thousands of bikes. Had lunch with old friend Paul Michael Kurtz and learned about his really cool ERC Starting Grant project PhiSci.
- Hosted two interviews which you can hear at the DEMBIB project blog, one with David Carr, who visited the project in January and February, and another with friend and colleague Petra Schmidtkunz.
- Had a fairly serious bike crash coinciding with forgetting to wear my helmet; probably will have a scar on my forehead from now on.
- Visited Leipzig with the family and saw Mephistopheles.
As a reminder, here’s the website for the DEMBIB project. Check out also my own website. You can follow me on Instagram (though I haven’t been posting much), and see more of my photography on Flickr.