Keynote Speaker

ROBERT ALTER

Distinguished literary critic, author and professor ROBERT ALTER has published widely on the modern European and American novel, on modern Hebrew literature, and on literary aspects of the Bible, most recently The Five Books of Moses: A Translation With Commentary, which has been the subject of long and enthusiastic reviews.

Professor Alter is the author of The Art of Biblical Narrative, The Art of Biblical Poetry, and the lyrical translation Genesis. He is Class of 1937 Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967.

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, and is past president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He has twice been a Guggenheim Fellow, has been a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, and Old Dominion Fellow at Princeton University.

Professor Alter's twenty published books include two prize-winning volumes on biblical narrative and poetry and an award-winning translation of Genesis. He has devoted book-length studies to Fielding, Stendhal, and the self-reflexive tradition in the novel. Books by him have been translated into eight different languages. Among his publications over the past fifteen years are Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (1991), Genesis: Translation and Commentary (1996), The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel (1999), Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (2000), and the newly released The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (2004).