Professor Aaron Koller

Aaron Koller studies Semitic languages, Hebrew Bible, material culture of the ancient Middle East, and Jewish intellectual history from the Iron Age through the Middle Ages. He wrote his doctorate on ancient Hebrew terms for tools; the resulting book was a study of agriculture, woodworking, and masonry in the ancient world. He later wrote books on Esther in Ancient Jewish Thought (Cambridge UP, 2014), which dealt with literature from the Persian and Hellenistic periods and rabbinic literature, and Unbinding Isaac: The Akedah for Modern Jewish Thought (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), which dealt with Kierkegaard and his legacy in modern biblical interpretation. He has published articles on a wide range of subjects including the history of the idea of a "word", and the history of alphabetical order, Egyptian wisdom literature and its later echoes, talmudic manuscripts, rabbinic Hebrew, Aramaic dialectology, and the Qur'an's use of rabbinic literature. A full list of publications is available here: https://cambridge.academia.edu/AaronKoller/CurriculumVitae.

Prof Koller has held research fellowships and been a visiting professor at Oxford University, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and the Albright Institute for Archaeological Research. His current project is a history of the alphabet, tentatively titled Alphabetica: A Global History of the World’s Most Successful Invention, set to be published in the spring of 2027.