Sergey Dolgopolski

PhD

Sergey Dolgopolski.

Sergey Dolgopolski

PhD

Sergey Dolgopolski

PhD

Gordon and Gretchen Gross Professor of Jewish Studies
Professor
Department of Jewish Thought
Professor
Department of Comparative Literature

Education

  • PhD, Jewish Studies, UC Berkeley and Graduate Theological Union
  • Doctor of Philosophical Sciences, Russian Academy of Sciences

About

Professor Sergey Dolgopolski’s general area of interest is the variety of ways in which philosophy and literature interact, creating new philosophical concepts and new literary forms. He specializes in the Talmud as a body of text and thought seen from poetic, rhetoric and philosophical perspectives, with a particular interest in mutual hermeneutics of philosophical, rhetorical and Talmudic traditions, and with emphasis on mutually shaping engagements of poetic Talmudic and philosophical thinking.

His newest book, Other Others: The Political After the Talmud (Fordham University Press, 2018; available for purchase on Amazon), puts contemporary political theory and a literary-theoretical exploration of the core text of Rabbinic Judaism, the Talmud, into both a fruitful and tensed conversation one with another. In the words of the book's catalogue description: "Denying legal and moral existence to those who do not belong to a land, while tolerating diversity of those who do stabilizes a political order—or does it? Revisiting this core problem of contemporary political theory, Other Others turns to the Talmud as an untapped resource for a conception of the political and a take on excluded others our philosophical and theological traditions have effaced."

Prof. Dolgopolksi's current project, tentatively titled: Suspending New Testament: The Political Philology of the Palestinian Talmud, renegotiates the competing notions and practices of citation in late antiquity and modernity by asking anew the question of the relationships between the law which always comes from the past and the citation of the law which is only and always available in the present. Can past be encapsulated as a form of the present? Can one avoid such an encapsulation? Through asking these questions the book renegotiates teleological approaches hitherto dominating both traditional reception/construction of and academic scholarship on the Palestinian Talmud in its relationship to the Babylonian Talmud in conjunction with the approaches to the New Testament in its relationship to the Old Testament.

Prof. Dolgopolski is also the author of the following:

Prior to joining UB in the fall of 2010, Prof. Dolgopolski taught at Kansas University-Lawrence, UC Davis, University of San Francisco, Graduate Theological Union, UC Berkeley, and conducted research in Jewish Studies as a Mellon Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at UC Berkeley.

Open Access Articles

 

Books