I was born in Leningrad, USSR in 1972, and was brought at the age of eight to New York, where I grew up until my emigration to Israel in 2007. I am a graduate of New York’s Stuyvesant High School, the University of Chicago (BA, MA), and the Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University (PhD), where I studied Northwest Semitic philology and wrote a dissertation on the language of the Hebrew liturgical poetry of Byzantine-period Palestine. After a few years spent on post-docs of various sorts, I settled down in Jerusalem, where I met my wife, had two children, and worked as a researcher in the medieval poetry section of the Historical Hebrew Dictionary Project of the Academy of the Hebrew Language. In 2013, I arrived with my family to Cambridge to take up a position at the University.
Dr Rand teaches undergraduate courses in Hebrew and the history and culture of the Middle East
Dr Rand is happy to supervise graduate students in areas relating to his research.
I specialize in the rather diffuse field of Medieval Hebrew Literature, within which I do research in two particular areas: rhymed-prose narrative (maqama) composed within the cultural and linguistic framework of the Arabic-speaking Mediterranean, and Jewish liturgical poetry (piyyut)—mostly in Hebrew, but some also in Aramaic—whose original home is Byzantine-period Palestine. Both corpora are well represented in the two enormous and related manuscript caches that were discovered (by Westerners) in the 19th century in Old Cairo and are now known as The Cairo Genizah and the Firkovitch Collections, respectively. The majority of the manuscripts originating in the Cairo Genizah are now held by the Cambridge University Library. As a result of prolonged close contact with manuscripts, I have also come to learn a lot about Hebrew codicology, and my research work consists in large part of the codicological reconstruction of manuscript fragments, as well as the production of critical editions of texts.
Current PhD students
| Paul Rodrigue: Working title: Jerome’s translation of the Book of Daniel |
