James Adam Redfield, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Jewish Anthropology and Hermeneutics
Office Hours
By appointment only.
Courses Taught
Hebrew Bible, Late Antique Judaism, Jewish Law, Scriptural Hermeneutics, World Religions
Education
- Ph.D. in Religious Studies (Judaism), Stanford University, 2017
- M.A. in Socio-Cultural Anthropology, UC Berkeley, 2010
Research Interests
My main research areas are classical rabbinic hermeneutics and anthropology, grounded
in wider interests in philosophy, comparative literature, and the history of the human
sciences. I have written a monograph in the former area (Adventures of Rabbah & Friends, 2025) and a dissertation on the latter (Stanford 2017), as well as articles and
other studies. My second monograph, very loosely related to my dissertation, is tentatively
titled Children of Prophets: Jewish Customs and Early Rabbinic Law. I have also published the edited volume Talmud /and/ Philosophy with Sergey Dolgopolski (2024) and done extensive work as a translator of Jewish
literature from French, German, Modern Hebrew, and Yiddish, including a translation
of Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky's Yiddish stories (From a Distant Relation, 2021).
- Rabbinic law and narrative
- Hermeneutics of the Hebrew Bible
- History of ethnography and anthropology
- Literary translation in theory and practice