Ilana Pardes

Ilana Pardes is the Katharine Cornell Professor of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  She is currently a Visiting Professor of the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. Her work has focused on the nexus of Bible, literature, and culture as well as on questions of gender, aesthetics, and hermeneutics. She is the author of Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach (Harvard University Press, 1992), The Biography of Ancient Israel: National Narratives in the Bible (University of California Press, 2000), Melville's Bibles (University of California, 2008); Agnon's Moonstruck Lovers: The Song of Songs in Israeli Culture (The Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies, University of Washington Press, 2013), The Song of Songs: A Biography (Princeton University Press, Lives of Great Religious Books, 2019), Ruth: A Migrant’s Tale (Yale University Press, Jewish Lives, 2022).