Talmud Scholar Joins Religious Studies Department

Christine E. Hayes, a scholar of Talmudic studies and Judaism in late antiquity, has joined the faculty as the Robert F. and Patricia R. Weis Assistant Professor of Religious Studies in Classical Judaica, President Richard C. Levin has announced.

Ms. Hayes served for the past three years as an assistant professor of Hebrew studies at Princeton University and was an instructor at Yale in the spring of 1993.

A 1984 graduate of Harvard University, she earned both M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California at Berkeley, where she was a three-time recipient of the Benjamin Goor Prize for Essay in Jewish Studies. In 1992, Ms. Hayes was an exchange student at Yale on a Charlotte Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship.

Her other areas of study include the Hebrew Bible, Midrash, medieval Jewish exegesis, and Hebrew and Aramaic languages. At Princeton, she taught courses on the Bible and Midrash, modern Hebrew, Judaism, Jewish law and rabbinic authority, and the Talmud.

Ms. Hayes is author of the forthcoming “Between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds,” which is being published by the Oxford University Press, and is a contributor to the forthcoming “Oxford Dictionary of Judaism.”

Her professional affiliations include membership in the National Association of Professors of Hebrew, Association for Jewish Studies, Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion.