I am a full professor of Rabbinic Culture at the Open University, Jerusalem. I specialise in Jewish liturgy and liturgical poetry from Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. My research focuses on intersections with contemporary Christian poetry, as well as questions of ritual and performance in late antique Near Eastern cultures. In recent years, I have undertaken several projects that combine traditional literary and philological analysis with quantitative and computational methods from the realm of Digital Humanities and computational literary studies.
During my time at St John's, I plan to focus on three major projects. Firstly, I intend to finalise my collaborative work with Prof. Máire Ni Mhaonaigh and Prof. Orietta Da Rold on poetic anthologies in the Middle Ages. Secondly, I will resume my collaboration with the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit at the Cambridge University Library. My master's and doctoral studies heavily relied on manuscripts from this collection, and in recent years, I have participated in a digital paleography project aimed at automatically detecting and dating poetic fragments. Finally, I aim to expand my ongoing research project on metaphors in medieval Hebrew poetry, supported by computational literary efforts to digitally annotate medieval poems and visualise the results to detect latent literary patterns.
https://www.openu.ac.il/en/personalsites/ofirmanor.aspx
