MONTREAL/September 30, 2004—
Mark R. Cohen is Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Educated at Brandeis University (B.A.), Columbia University (M.A.), and the Jewish Theological Seminary (M.H.L., Rabbi, Ph.D.
His publications include more than 80 articles and reviews and several books. These include: Jewish Self-Government in Medieval Egypt, 1980, which won the National Jewish Book Award for Jewish history in 1981; Jewish Life in Medieval Egypt 641-1382, translated into Arabic, a survey written for readers in the Arab world, 1987; The Autobiography of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi: Leon Modena's Life of Judah, 1988; and, most recently, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages, 1994. His recently completed two books about poverty and charity in the Jewish community of Egypt in the Middle Ages, based on documents from the Cairo Geniza. They will be published by Princeton University Press.
Cohen has been a Lady Davis Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1982-1983) and a Fellow of its Institute for Advanced Studies (1992-93). He was a guest lecturer in the Department of Hebrew Language and Culture at Ain Shams University in Cairo (December 1993). He was a Visiting Professor in the graduate program of the Hebrew University's School for Overseas Students in 1997, and in June of that year taught a seminar at the Free University in Berlin. He has also held a Guggenheim Fellowship (1996-1997) and a Fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin (2002-2003).
Cohen has lectured widely in the U.S., Europe, Japan, Israel, and Egypt, before both scholarly and general audiences.
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