Friday, September 19, 2014

Conversations with two DSS scholars

TWO INTERVIEWS with specialists in the Dead Sea Scrolls:

Eileen Schuller: Five questions for McMaster’s Dead Sea Scrolls expert (Dave Churchill, Hamilton Spectator).
McMaster professor and renowned Dead Sea Scrolls expert Eileen Marie Schuller has been named a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

It's considered Canada's highest academic honour.

Schuller is one of only a handful of international researchers responsible for the scrolls' initial deciphering and publication. She is also author of "The Dead Sea Scrolls: What Have We Learned?" published in 2006.

Schuller belongs to the Ursuline Sisters, an order of Catholic nuns who work in education and health care. She has earned the moniker "the flying nun" among her McMaster colleagues because of all the travelling she does for her Dead Sea Scrolls work.

Her specialty within the scrolls is psalms, hymns and poetry, which she has translated extensively.

Here are five questions for Schuller.

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Background on her election to the RSC is here.

Charlotte Hempel: Coffee Table Talk with Charlotte Hempel (podcast with Marginalia).
In this interview with MRB’s editor-in-chief Timothy Michael Law, Charlotte Hempel discusses how she began her career of study in the Dead Sea Scrolls, where the current challenges and prospects in the field lie, the new interdisciplinarity in Scrolls research, what we know and don’t know about the community at Qumran, her current research project on the diversity of literatures in the Second Temple period, and more.

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