I received my Ph. D. in Near Eastern Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 1987. Immediately thereafter I came to Emory to become Assistant Professor of Hebrew and Arabic. In 1992 I published my book, Multiglossia in Judeo-Arabic, With an Edition, Translation and Grammatical Study of the Cairene Purim Scroll (Leiden: Brill), where I examined the nature of Judeo-Arabic, the language of the Jews in Arab land in addition to a thorough linguistic analysis of a sixteenth-century Egyptian Judeo-Arabic text. In 1994 I was promoted to Associate Professor and helped create the Program in Linguistics. I was then appointed its first director. I am currently working on a book manuscript entitled Studies in Egyptian Judeo-Arabic Religious Translations, which is a study of the genre of the sharh literal translations of Jewish sacred religious texts, biblical or liturgical, from Hebrew into Judeo-Arabic. In this book I demonstrate how the translations influenced Jewish identity and Historical Memory in Arab lands and were motivated by them. In addition, I am also currently involved in co-editing with Fred Astern and John Hayes the book, Judaism and Islam - Boundaries and Interaction which is a collection of essays presented to William Brinner upon his retirement.
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