Ben Notis is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures. His dissertation focuses on Hebrew poetry written during an exciting time of Jewish-Muslim interaction in al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) in the eleventh-and-twelfth-centuries. He hopes to explore lyrical complaints about physical and mental breakdowns, betrayal and abuse, separation from friends and lovers, and the vicissitudes of Time. His other interests include medieval Arabic poetry, the histories of madness and emotions, and the cultural history of the human body. A graduate of Brandeis’s NEJS department in 2017, he wrote his BA thesis on thunder in Kabbalistic thought. Having studied Arabic and Hebrew throughout his undergraduate and graduate studies, he also attended the Middlebury Arabic Language School in Summer 2019.
Medieval Hebrew poetry;
Arabic literature;
History of emotion;
History of madness;
Cultural history of the human body
Teaching Assistant, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, Professor Isabel Cranz, Fall 2019
Teaching Assistant, Modern Hebrew Literature and Culture in Translation: The Holocaust in Literature and Film, Professor Nili Gold, Spring 2020
Teaching Assistant, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, Professor Isabel Cranz, Fall 2020
Teaching Assistant, The Making of the Middle East, Professor Paul Cobb, Spring 2021
The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
Jewish Studies Program