Professor Marzena Zawanowska
Biography
Graduated from the Department of Hebraic and Arabic Studies (2001), completed her PhD at the Faculty of Oriental Studies (UW) in collaboration with Tel Aviv University (2008), where she completed postdoctoral fellowships.
For many years she was affiliated with the Department of Jewish Culture and History (Maria Curie-Skłodowska University) and the Department of Hebraistics (University of Warsaw), and now she also works as a curator of the manuscript collection at the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute.
She received her habilitation on the basis of a series of articles on Karaism and Jewish biblical exegesis in Arabic in the world of medieval Islam (2019).
Her main research interests include medieval biblical exegesis (especially Karaite biblical exegesis written in Judeo-Arabic), as well as the borderlands of Judaism and Islam, the history of Jewish thought, and literature.
Most important publications
Most important scholarly articles
The Bible Read through the Prism of Theology: The Medieval Karaite Tradition of Translating Explicit Anthropomorphisms into Arabic, „Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy” 24 (2016), 163–223
‘Where the Plain Meaning is Obscure or Unacceptable…’: The Treatment of Implicit Anthropomorphisms in the Karaite Tradition of Arabic Bible Translation, „European Journal of Jewish Studies” 10 (2016), 1–49