Vanderbilt University and Syriaca.org are pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Nathan P. Gibson as a Postdoctoral Scholar in Syriac Studies and Digital Humanities, effective October 1, 2015.
Dr. Gibson will undertake a two-year research project at Vanderbilt University under the direction of Prof. David A. Michelson as part of the Syriaca.org research group. Syriaca.org is a project to document Syriac culture, history, and literature. Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic which was once used widely across the middle east and is still used by religious and ethnic minority communities in the region.
Dr. Gibson is trained as a scholar of Classical Syriac and Arabic culture and literature and received his Ph.D. in Semitic and Egyptian Languages and Literatures from The Catholic University of America in 2015. He also holds an M.A. in Biblical History and Geography from Jerusalem University College. His research interests include intellectual and cultural history, particularly as they appear in personal and rhetorical encounters among diverse religious communities of the Middle East. His dissertation, directed by Prof. Sidney Griffith, examined the acclaimed Arabic prose writer al-Jahiz of ninth-century Iraq.
Dr. Gibson’s work for Syriaca.org will involve co-editing several reference works including The Syriac Biographical Dictionary and the New Handbook of Syriac Literature. These resources will enable scholars to better navigate the vast corpus of Syriac literature which survives from antiquity and the middle ages.
As part of Dr. Gibson’s research collaboration, he will also be hosted as a Gastwissenschaftler at the Institute of Near and Middle Eastern Studies of the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany.