David Stern
Harry Starr of Classical and Modern Hebrew and Jewish Literature
Harvard University

David Stern is Harry Starr Professor of Classical and Modern Hebrew and Jewish Literature in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University and Professor of Comparative Literature in Harvard’s Dept. of Comparative Literature. He is also Director of Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies. Before coming to Harvard, Stern was Berg Professor of Classical Hebrew Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Stern holds a B.A. from Columbia College and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, ACLS, NEH, and Radcliffe Institute, and has been a visiting professor at the University of Washington, Princeton University, and the University of Nanjing. Stern’s fields of specialization are ancient and medieval Jewish literature and culture and the history of Biblical interpretation. Most of his current research and writing deals with the history of the Jewish book. He is the author or editor (or co-editor) of fourteen books.

Selected Publications

Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature (Harvard University Press)

Rabbinic Fantasies: Imaginative Narratives from Classical Hebrew Literature (Yale University Press)

The Washington Haggadah by Joel ben Simeon: A Fifteenth Century Manuscript from The Library of Congress (Harvard University Press)

The Monk’s Haggadah: A Fifteenth Century Illuminated Codex from the Monastery of Tegernsee with a Prologue by the Friar Erhard von Pappenheim (Penn State University Press)

The Jewish Bible: A Material History (University of Washington Press, 2017)