David Stern Named Moritz and Josephine Berg Professor

David M. Stern, a member of the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department faculty, has been named the Moritz and Josephine Berg Professor. Stern’s fields of specialization include classical Jewish literature and religion, as well as the history of the Jewish book.

A recipient of fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Philosophical Society, Stern is the author of eight books, including Rabbinic Fantasies: Imaginative Narratives from Classical Hebrew Literature and Midrash and Theory: Ancient Jewish Exegesis and Contemporary Literary Studies. He is currently working on two books about the history of the Jewish book—The Jewish Library: Four Jewish Classics and the Jewish Experience and Through the Pages of the Past: The Story of the Jewish Book.

Stern received his bachelor’s degree in English from Columbia College and his doctorate in comparative literature from Harvard University. After three years as a Junior Fellow in Harvard’s Society of Fellows, Stern went on to teach at the University of Judaism and the Hebrew University, before joining the Penn faculty in 1984. He served as director of the Jewish Studies Program at Penn from 1998 through 2005, and has also taught as a visiting professor at Princeton University, the University of Washington and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The Moritz and Josephine Berg Professorship was established by the Estate of Alfred A. Berg in 1951 to support a faculty member whose interests include Judaica.