Notes on Contributors
Joel S. Baden is Professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale University. His main area of research is the Pentateuch, especially the history of its composition. The author of numerous academic books and articles, he has also written widely for a popular audience, in venues such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic.
Sonja Brentjes is a historian of science at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, specializing in the history of institutions, maps, the mathematical sciences, the relationship between the arts and sciences, and European travelers in Islamicate societies from the ninth to the seventeenth centuries. She has published widely on medieval and early modern histories of mapmaking, mathematics, and cross-cultural encounters in Europe and the Middle East, as well as the historiography concerning these periods and regions.
Johannes Bronkhorst is a retired Indologist (University of Lausanne), specializing in the history of classical Indian thought in its various manifestations. He has extensively published in this field, most recently A Śabda Reader: Language in Classical Indian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), and “Synchronic Etymologising and Its Role in the Acquisition of Language,” Bhāṣā 1, no. 2 (2022): 177–194.
Markham J. Geller is Jewish Chronicle Professor of Semitic Languages at University College London within the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies. From 2011–2018, he was on secondment from UCL as Professor für Wissensgeschichte at the Freie Universität, Berlin, where he was also PI of an ERC Advanced Grant Project BabMed, which represents the first ever comprehensive study of ancient Babylonian medical science since the decipherment of cuneiform, comprising the largest ancient collection of medical data before Hippocrates.
Geller is currently a visiting scholar at the MPIWG, Berlin, and collaborator on a British Museum Wellcome-funded project NinMed to produce an online edition of the Nineveh medical library (2020–2022).
Michele Loporcaro is Professor of Romance Linguistics at the University of Zurich, a Fellow of Academia Europaea and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His research—for which he received in 2012 the Feltrinelli prize of the Accademia dei Lincei, bestowed by the President of the Italian Republic—spans historical linguistics, linguistic historiography, and the phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon of the Romance languages, with a main focus on Italo-Romance. His papers have appeared in numerous academic journals. He is the author of several monographs, including Gender from Latin to Romance: History, Geography, Typology (OUP, 2018, shortlisted for the Prose Awards of the Association of American Publishers), Vowel Length from Latin to Romance (OUP, 2015), Profilo linguistico dei dialetti italiani (Editori Laterza, 2009, updated repr. 2016), as well as editor of numerous collaborative volumes.
Bill M. Mak received his PhD in Indian literature and Buddhist philology from Peking University in 2010, and subsequently completed doctoral coursework in Indological Studies at Kyoto University. Mak held a number of research and teaching positions at Hamburg University, University of Hong Kong, and Kyoto Sangyo University before his prior appointment as Associate Professor at Kyoto University. His current research focuses on the history of Indian astronomy and the historical studies of Sanskrit in China. Among his recent publications are East-West Encounter in the Science of Heaven and Earth (2019, co-edited with Tokimasa Takeda), Overlapping Cosmologies (2022, co-edited with Eric Huntington) and his edition and translation of Sanskrit and Chinese astral texts including the Yavanajātaka, Gārgīyajyotiṣa, and Duliyusi jing. Mak is a research fellow at the Needham Research Institute and Bye Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge University. He is currently also Director of Chinese Research Center, ISF Academy, Hong Kong.
Glenn W. Most retired in November 2020 as Professor of Greek Philology at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, and remains a regular Visiting Professor on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and an External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. He has published books on Classics; ancient philosophy; the history and methodology of Classical studies; comparative literature, cultural studies, and the history of religion; literary theory; and the history of art; and he has published numerous articles, reviews, and translations in these fields and also in such other ones as modern philosophy and literature.
Filippomaria Pontani is Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Venice “Ca’ Foscari.” He studies the manuscript transmission of Greek texts, and has produced various critical editions (from Plutarch’s Natural Questions to Poliziano’s Liber epigrammatum Graecorum to Gemistus Pletho’s De Homero), focusing particularly on the Greek exegesis on Homer’s Odyssey (five volumes of scholia published so far, Rome 2007–2022; prolegomena: Sguardi su Ulisse, Rome 2005). He has published extensively on Greek and Latin poetry; ancient grammar and rhetoric; allegory and geography; as well as on Byzantine, humanistic, and Modern Greek literature.
Mårten Söderblom Saarela is a historian of the Qing empire, with an interest in the cultural, intellectual, and political history of language. He is the author of The Early Modern Travels of Manchu: A Script and Its Study in East Asia and Europe (Penn, 2020), co-editor (with Henning Klöter) of Language Diversity in the Sinophone World: Historical Trajectories, Language Planning, and Multilingual Practices (Routledge, 2021), and of Saksaha: A Journal of Manchu Studies. Söderblom Saarela works as an associate research fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica.
Dagmar Schäfer is a sinologist and historian of science and technology. She is Director of Department III (Artifacts, Action, Knowledge) at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), Berlin; Honorary Professor at Technische Universität Berlin and at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research centers around the history and sociology of technology in China. She has published widely on the premodern history of China (Song–Ming) and the changing role of artifacts in the creation, diffusion, and use of scientific and technological knowledge.
Roy Tzohar specializes in the history of philosophy with a focus on Buddhist and Brahmanical philosophical traditions in India. He is currently an associate professor in the East and South Asian Studies Department at Tel Aviv University. His research interests include Buddhist notions of nonconceptuality and action, and the role and meaning of Buddhist poetic literature. He has published widely on the Buddhist Yogācāra School, among others, a monograph on the School’s theory of language and metaphor. He is currently working on a book manuscript on the works of Buddhist poet and philosopher Aśvaghoṣa.
Benjamin G. Wright III is University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Religion Studies at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He specializes in Biblical Studies, ancient Jewish and Christian literature, and the history of Judaism and Early Christianity. His research focuses mostly on Judaism in the Second Temple period (from about 300 BCE to the end of the first century CE), which includes the beginnings of Christianity. He has published widely on subjects such as Jewish Wisdom literature of the period; the translation of Jewish literature from Hebrew into Greek; and the Dead Sea Scrolls. He is also the author of a commentary on the Letter of Aristeas (de Gruyter, 2015) and co-editor of A New English Translation of the Septuagint (OUP, 2007).