Professor Ben Outhwaite

Head of the Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge University Library since 2006, after seven years there as a Genizah researcher. BA in Hebrew Studies and MPhil in medieval Hebrew literature, Christ’s College, Cambridge; his Cambridge PhD, supervised by Professor Geoffrey Khan, treats the grammatical description of Hebrew letters in the Genizah. He leads the team responsible for the Taylor–Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection, the largest single collection of medieval Jewish manuscripts in the world. His research concerns Hebrew and its use and transmission in the Middle Ages: the vocalization traditions of Biblical and post-biblical Hebrew, medieval Hebrew as a medium of communication in the early Middle Ages, the form and function of the medieval Hebrew Bible, and the documentary history of the communities whose manuscripts were deposited in the Cairo Genizah. His projects have been funded by the AHRC, the British Academy, the Wellcome Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others, and he is a series editor for Brill’s Cambridge Genizah Studies.