Subject:
Mosaic Journeys-
A historico-critical study of Q18:60-82
Supervisor: Dr. Yosef Witztum and Dr. Naphtali MeshelAbstract:
Sarah’s doctoral research focuses on the Moses episode in Sūrat al-Kahf 18:60-82 and its literary background in Late Antiquity. She traces the narrative predecessors of Moses’ journey to sources as diverse as the Gilgamesh Epos, Apocalyptic Literature and the Sayings of the Desert Fathers.
Reading the classic Islamic commentaries as polytexts, she demonstrates their interplay with the many archives of Late Antiquity. Sarah’s research sheds new light on the traditional exegetes as sensitive readers with their own modes of critical thought and philological practices. By combining the study of Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, Greek, and Latin sources, she examines the stories of stories in the Qurʾān.
Sarah believes that motifs are not static elements but instruments of transformation– discursive devices for memory and forgetting; that travel narratives are also travelling narratives and that the world is made of stories and not of atoms.
Bio: Sarah grew up as a horse acrobat in Germany before she immigrated to Israel. Besides the Hebrew University of Jerusalem she studied at the Sorbonne and the Pontifical Gregorian University. Sarah is now a PhD student in the department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the guidance of Dr. Joseph Witztum and Dr. Naphtali Meshel.
After her MA she worked in cinema and journalism for over a decade. Her work as a filmmaker is driven by a strong sense of social justice and by a wish to explore visual parallels of emotional states. She has lived, volunteered, reported and documented from India, China, Mongolia, Russia, the Syrian border, refugee camps of Germany, Israel and the Palestinian territories and most recently, from the Ukrainian border.
She was a fellow in the residence program at the Doha Institute for Advanced Studies and a research fellow at the India International Centre, New Delhi. In her free time, Sarah likes to stand on her hands, play the oud disharmoniously, to make furniture out of discarded wood and explore hidden places.
Azrieli Scholarship 2022/23
President Stipend