Dr Nathaniel Greene will join the Divinity Department in September 2021 to replace Professor Joachim Schaper during his tenure of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2021-2024).
Dr Nathaniel Greene spent his graduate education studying Hebrew Bible and Northwest Semitic Languages and Literatures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr Greene comes to the University of Aberdeen after having held visiting positions at both his alma mater and at Brandeis University. His research focuses on the origins of writing and literary production in the early phases of the Iron Age in Israel. His forthcoming book, Warlord and Scribe: The Nascent Israelite State beneath Its Textual Veneers—with Eisenbrauns, an imprint of Penn State University Press—inquires about the origins of the Israelite state and how those origins are reflected in the redactional layers of 1 Samuel 9–14 and the Levantine material culture record. He also maintains research interests in Hebrew poetry and poetic structure, Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the social location(s) of power and identity in the Iron Age Levant, and the use and development of writing systems of all kinds.
As an epigrapher and palaeographer, Nathaniel also works extensively in digital approaches to the past. Applying imaging methods such as Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) to Semitic inscriptions, his research brings textual artefacts of ancient Israel and its environs back to life and into closer contact with his students. He is a co-founder of the Wisconsin Palmyrene Aramaic Inscription Project, which has worked to document and publish anew inscriptions from the corpus of Palmyrene Aramaic held the world over, and a co-founder and executive board member of the Colloquium for Biblical and Near Eastern Studies.