Personal Biography

I read Hebrew with Aramaic and Syriac as an undergraduate at the University of Oxford and gained my doctorate from the same institution in the field of Arabic linguistics. My doctoral thesis examined the phonology and morphology of the Rweyli dialect of Arabic, for which I also produced a dictionary. 

 I returned to Oxford as a junior postdoctoral researcher on the AHRC/DFG-funded project ‘The History of the Jewish Book in the Islamicate World’ (PIs: Professor Judith Olszowy-Schlanger and Professor Dr Ronny Vollandt), and since 2023 I have been working on digital Hebrew palaeography as part of a Fellowship from Digital Scholarship at Oxford (DiSc).

 I am also a research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and have previously been a research assistant at the universities of Oxford and Sheffield, working on projects in Rabbinic literature and in phonetics, and a supervisor in phonetics, phonology, and morphology at the University of Cambridge.

Research and Teaching

I am interested in medieval Jewish book history, and particularly in Hebrew and Arabic sources which shed light on the production context: I have worked on colophons and other paratextual elements in manuscripts as well as ink recipes and booklists.

 Since 2022 I have been a team member of the Hebrew Palaeography Album (HebrewPal), an online resource which guides students and researchers through the process of creating detailed palaeographical descriptions of Hebrew script through the digital annotation of images. I have presented on the HebrewPal project at international conferences and have used the platform to teach digital palaeography in Oxford, Rome, and online. HebrewPal is part of the ERC-Synergy project MiDRASH, which will apply computational methods to the data we produce.

 In Oxford I teach a weekly seminar on reading medieval Hebrew manuscripts, and I have also taught medieval Hebrew set texts as well as being a Prelims tutor in phonetics and phonology for the Faculty of Linguistics.