The Religions and Cultures of Late Bronze to Iron Age West Semitic Societies, Iron Age Israelite Religions, Literacy and Literary Production in the Early Southern Levant, the Compositional History of Israelite Traditions and the Making of the Hebrew Bible.
Brian’s research specializations, as well as his academic training, university teaching and educational outreach bridge the fields of ancient Near Eastern history, cultures and religions, the northwest Semitic languages and literatures, and biblical studies (Hebrew Bible). He is a social historian of the ancient West Asian cultures and religions of the eastern Mediterranean littoral spanning the Late Bronze to Iron Ages. Brian has published extensively in the areas of ancient magic, religion and ritual, death, demons, and the afterlife, and more recently, ancient literacy, literary composition and the transfer of knowledge. This constellation of intellectual domains and technical expertise is expressive of his career-long commitment to an integrated methodological approach in which he interfaces archaeological data, epigraphic materials and the ‘critical’ (= academic) study of the biblical text, the goal of which is to recreate substantive images of the socio-historical realities of both ancient Israel and its neighbors.
In support of his research efforts, Brian has been awarded the National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship, the University of Michigan Humanities Fellowship, the Michigan Humanities Institute Research Fellowship, and the University of Sydney’s Mandelbaum Scholar-in-Residence Award for which he also delivered the annual Alan Crown Memorial Lecture. He has served as a visiting Research Fellow at the American Overseas Research Centers in Ammon (ACOR), Istanbul (ARIT), Jerusalem (AIAR), Nicosia (CAARI), and at the French Institute for Arabic Studies in Damascus. The American Philosophical Society, The Council of American Overseas Research Centers, The American Academy of Religion, The Society of Biblical Literature, The American Council of Learned Societies and The Catholic Biblical Association have each awarded him grants to present his research at international conferences, to participate in archaeological field work in Israel (Miqne-Ekron) and Syria (Ras Shamra-Ugarit) and to undertake epigraphic research in the national museums of Syria (Damascus, Aleppo, Latakia), Turkey (Istanbul), Jordan (Ammon), Israel (Jerusalem), Cyprus (Nicosia) and France (Louvre, Paris).
