Gantt Gurley

Gantt Gurley received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007. Before coming to Oregon he lectured at the University of California’s Scandinavian Department and was a Harry Starr Fellow in Judaica at the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. He is Associate Professor of Scandinavian, and the Director of Undergraduate Studies and the Financial Liasson for the Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies. He was director of the program from 2017–2024. He is the authority on Meïr Aaron Goldschmidt, one of the most important Jewish novelists of the nineteenth century. His 2017 monograph "Meïr Aaron Goldschmidt and the Poetics of Jewish Fiction" examines one of Denmark’s greatest nationalistic writers as first and foremost a Jewish artist, exploring his relationship to the Hebrew Bible and later Rabbinical traditions such as the Talmud and the Midrash as a form of poetics. Gurley is also an expert in the early legend of the Golem and how the story migrated from the Pale of Settlement into its modern Prague context. He is currently working on a project in German and French, looking at Jewish writers in the early 1830's who took a political stance on emancipation. A central aim of Gurley's research is to illuminate the mechanisms whereby Jewish and Hebraic thought is reawakened in the European consciousness.

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