Ballot Archive

27 Oct 2016

Candidate Details

Candidate Name

Ben Outhwaite

Academic degrees, honours etc.

PhD, Hebrew Linguistics (2000); MPhil, Medieval Hebrew (1995); BA, Hebrew Studies (1995) (Christ's College, Cambridge).

Profession or occupation

Head of the Genizah Research Unit, Cambidge University Library

Grounds for election

Ben Outhwaite's PhD (2000) was a grammar of epistolary Hebrew, based on the hundreds of letters written by the Jews of Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Iraq between 1000 and 1250 CE preserved in the remarkable Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection at Cambridge University Library. Subsequently he worked as a research associate in the Cambridge Genizah Research Unit, completing two major volumes of catalogues based on the 10,000 leaves of medieval Hebrew Bibles in the collection. For the last ten years he has led the Unit, steering a range of cataloguing, digitisation and research projects. He publishes, teaches and lectures on the Cairo Genizah manuscripts and the communities that produced them in the Middle Ages, and on Hebrew philology — particularly medieval Hebrew and the range of pronunciation traditions of the Biblical Hebrew language preserved in medieval Bible manuscripts. He has held major grants from the AHRC, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Rothschild Foundation.

Signatories

The following Fellows have signed this Blue Paper