Swift Hall 300C
1025 E. 58th St.
Chicago, IL 60637

Tel: (773) 702-8241
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James T. Robinson

Assistant Professor of the History of Judaism in the Divinity School

M.Phil. (Oxford University)
M.A., Ph.D. (Harvard University)

James Robinson’s research focuses on medieval Jewish intellectual history, philosophy, and biblical exegesis in the Islamic East and Christian Europe. His main interests are in the literary and social dimensions of philosophy, and the relation between philosophy and religion. Specific interests include ethics, political philosophy, and psychology; the history of philosophical-allegorical exegesis; the translation and reception of Greek and Arabic philosophy and science; Jewish Sufism and Neoplatonism; Maimonides, Maimonideanism, and the Maimonidean controversies; religious polemic; sermons and homilectical literature; and the interactions between the Jewish, Islamic, and Christian intellectual traditions.

His courses include Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages; Medieval Commentaries on Ecclesiastes; Readings in Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed; Abraham in History, Literature, and Thought; The Jewish Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages; The Jews in Medieval Spain; Interactions between Jewish Philosophy and Literature in the Middle Ages; Jewish Heretics and Apostates in the Middle Ages; Soul, Intellect and Immortality in Medieval Jewish Thought; Science and Scripture: Jewish Philosophical Exegesis in the Middle Ages; Animal Spirituality in the Middle Ages; Readings in Abraham Ibn Ezra; Medieval Jewish Thought: Philosophy, Sufism, Kabbalah.