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Originally from Melbourne Australia, I joined Harvard in 2021, where I presently serve as the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. I am a scholar of the Hebrew Bible who specializes in ritual texts and the history of Israelite religion. My research is philologically robust and historically grounded, with a strong emphasis on the comparative study of the Hebrew Bible in light of wider Near Eastern sources. I received my Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible from the University of Lausanne (Switzerland), a Bachelor of Theology (Honors) from Whitley College, University of Divinity (Australia), and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Melbourne (Australia).
My first book Centralizing the Cult: The Holiness Legislation in Leviticus 17–26 (Mohr Siebeck, 2019) was awarded the 2021 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise. For my second book project, provisionally entitled Calendar and Commemoration: Memorializing War in the Hebrew Bible, I was awarded a Beaufort Visiting fellowship at St John's College, University of Cambridge in 2023. Beyond these two book projects, I have published widely in edited collections and journals, including the Journal of Biblical Literature, Dead Sea Discoveries, Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, Journal of Hebrew Scriptures, and Catholic Biblical Quarterly. My article on the pig prohibition (JBL 142: 221–41) was awarded the 2021 David Noel Freedman Award for Excellence and Creativity in Hebrew Bible Scholarship and featured in the New York Times.
I have co-edited four books, Text and Ritual in the Pentateuch: A Systematic and Comparative Approach (with Christophe Nihan; Eisenbrauns 2021), Authorship and the Hebrew Bible (with Sonja Ammann and Katharina Pyschny; Mohr Siebeck, 2022), Collective Violence and Memory in the Ancient Mediterranean (with Sonja Ammann et al.; Brill 2024), and The Scrolls of the Torah: Material, Compositional, and Interpretive Perspectives (with Jan C. Gertz, Thomas Römer, and Konrad Schmid; Mohr Siebeck, 2026). I have served as guest editor for the journals Semitica, Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel, and Journal of Ancient Judaism. I am also the co-chair of the Pentateuch Program Unit of the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature and the book reviews editor of the journal Vetus Testamentum.
This website contains information about my research, teaching, and service at Harvard University and within the broader field of biblical and ancient Near Eastern studies (my full CV is also available). I am presently accepting graduate students and would be delighted to hear from potential advisees.