Dr. Giacomo Loi

Giacomo Loi is Azrieli International Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa. He is particularly interested in the complex entanglements between Greco-Roman antiquity and modern Jewish culture. Specifically, his research bridges between classical literature, archaeology, and modern Hebrew literature. He has proposed a new interpretive model that traces how ancient cultural encounters with Greco-Roman civilization shaped modern Jewish identity and its relationship with European modernity and the “West” from the 19th to the 21st centuries. In the past, he has worked at the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, Paris, taught Classics and Jewish studies at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, as doctoral candidate, and is among the initiators and leaders of the project Gentile Antiquity: The Reception of Antiquity in Modern Italian Jewish Literature. He has received the Kingdon Award for New Perspectives in Jewish Studies from Columbia University and has lectured at several universities in the US, Israel, France, the UK, and Italy.