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James Adam Redfield, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Jewish Anthropology and Hermeneutics

Office Hours

By appointment only.

Courses Taught

Hebrew Bible, Late Antique Judaism, Jewish Law, Scriptural Hermeneutics, World Religions

Education

  • Ph.D. in Religious Studies (Judaism), Stanford University, 2017
  • M.A. in Socio-Cultural Anthropology, UC Berkeley, 2010

Research Interests

My main research areas are classical rabbinic hermeneutics and anthropology, grounded in wider interests in philosophy, comparative literature, and the history of the human sciences. I have written a monograph in the former area (Adventures of Rabbah & Friends, 2025) and a dissertation on the latter (Stanford 2017), as well as articles and other studies. My second monograph, very loosely related to my dissertation, is tentatively titled Children of Prophets: Jewish Customs and Early Rabbinic Law. I have also published the edited volume Talmud /and/ Philosophy with Sergey Dolgopolski (2024) and done extensive work as a translator of Jewish literature from French, German, Modern Hebrew, and Yiddish, including a translation of Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky's Yiddish stories (From a Distant Relation, 2021).

  • Rabbinic law and narrative
  • Hermeneutics of the Hebrew Bible
  • History of ethnography and anthropology
  • Literary translation in theory and practice