Biography
I completed my undergraduate degree in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge, specialising in Hebrew and Arabic. Having become interested in contact between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine, I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Hebrew in the Bedouin community in Israel.
After graduation, I decided to pursue further training in Biblical Hebrew, a language found at the intersection of classical philology, biblical and religious studies. It is this multidimensional nature of Biblical Hebrew that I found particularly exciting. I focused on Biblical Hebrew quotations in the Aramaic incantation bowls. It was fascinating to be studying the transmission of the Hebrew Bible at a point at which Hebrew was no longer a vernacular, and the Jewish community relied heavily on memorisation as a means of transmission.
Now, for my PhD, I am moving in time into our days. I will be studying a highly endangered Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialect. I am looking forward to utilising my previous knowledge of historical and contact linguistics within a new language context. Doubtless, I am motivated by my own language background, coming from a minority endangered language. Wish me luck, I mean, kshara in Neo-Aramaic.
Other academic interests.
Transmission of the Hebrew Bible in Late Antiquity
Pronunciation traditions of Biblical Hebrew
Historical Linguistics of Hebrew (especially phonology)
Language contact in Semitics
Modern Arabic dialectology (especially Palestinian dialects)
