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Judith Baskin

Philip H. Knight Professor Emerita in Humanities
Judaic Studies Program, Middle East and North African Studies, Religious Studies

Statement

Judith R. Baskin, Philip H. Knight Professor of Humanities, is Associate Dean for Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Professor Baskin served as President of the Association for Jewish Studies from 2004 to the end of 2006. A recipient of the Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from Yale University in 1976, she taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst from 1976-88, and at the University at Albany, SUNY, where she was Chair of the Department of Judaic Studies from 1988 to 2000. Dr. Baskin, who has been at the University of Oregon since 2000, was awarded the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, by the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Los Angeles, in 2012.

Dr. Baskin is the author of Midrashic Women: Formations of the Feminine in Rabbinic Literature (2002) and Pharaoh's Counsellors: Job, Jethro and Balaam in Rabbinic and Patristic Tradition (1983). Her most recent edited volumes are The Cambridge Dictionary of Judaism and Jewish Culture (2011) and The Cambridge Guide to Jewish History, Religion, and Culture (2010), co-edited with Kenneth Seeskin and a 2011 National Jewish Book Award winner. Other edited volumes include Jewish Women in Historical Perspective, now in its second edition (1998), and Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing (1994). Professor Baskin is currently writing a feminist commentary on Tractate Megillah of the Babylonian Talmud.