Naila Razzaq

Dissertation Title:

“At the Origins of Culture: Ideologies of Language and Knowledge Transmission in Early Jewish and Related Literature” 

Naila is a PhD candidate and studies early Jewish texts and communities from the Hellenistic-Roman (2nd cent BCE-1st cent CE) period through Late Antiquity. She is interested in presentations of primeval history, ancient origin stories, language contact, language politics and identity formation. Her work centers on themes of loss, recovery, transmission of knowledge, and narratives of linguistic and cultural revival in the Hellenistic period and the afterlives of early Jewish texts in later traditions and languages including Syriac, Ethiopic and Arabic. She is also interested in the reception and appropriation of ancient texts and ideas on language by European linguists and orientalists in the 18th and 19th centuries. 

At Yale, Naila has taught undergraduate and graduate level courses and is a fellow at the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning. She has served as an instructor for classical Hebrew for several years and recently developed an undergraduate seminar on the politics of language and religious identity from antiquity to the present. 

Research Interests: 

Pseudepigrapha, Dead Sea Scrolls, language politics /multilingualism, philology, comparative semitics, historiography, primeval histories, Syriac, Ethiopic, biblical studies, pre-Islamic Arabia, post-colonial studies, reception history, 18/19th cent orientalism, history of linguistics