Carol Bakhos

Carol Bakhos is professor of Jewish studies and of the study of religion at the University of California, Los Angeles. She holds the Robert E. Archer Chair in the Study of Religion. She earned a masters in theology from Harvard University (1992) and did her doctoral work at the Jewish Theological Seminary (2000). Prior to joining the department of Near Eastern Languages at UCLA, she taught at Middlebury College (1998–2002). She is currently the chair of the Study of Religion program and director of the Center for the Study of Religion at UCLA. Her research interests include Jewish studies generally, rabbinic literature, late antique Judaism, and comparative Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, with a focus on scriptural interpretation. In addition to many scholarly articles, she is the author of The Family of Abraham: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Interpretations (2014) and Ishmael on the Border: Rabbinic Portrayals of the First Arab (2006) and editor of several books, including Judaism in Its Hellenistic Context (2004), Current Trends in the Study of Midrash (2006), and the coedited works The Talmud in Its Iranian Context (2010), Islam and Its Past (2017), The Jewish Middle Ages (2023), and Making History (2024). She has served on the board of the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS) for several years and from 2013 to 2015 was the AJS vice president for outreach. She also served as coeditor of AJS Review. She is the editor of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, Volume 2: Emerging Judaism, 332 BCE–600 CE.