Shmuel Trigano, Senior Fellow

Shmuel Trigano is Professor of Sociology of Religion and Politics at the University of Paris. He has published 18 books and edited numerous others in the fields of Jewish and Jewish Political Philosophy, Identity, Modernity, Contemporary Judaism, French Jewry, Sociology of Religion and Politics. His publications include The Democratic Ideal and the Shoah: The Unthought in Political Modernity (SUNY Press, 2009; Ben Gurion University Press, 2010 [Hebrew]); Philosophy of the Law (Shalem Press, 2012); and Judaism and the Spirit of the World (Grasset, 2011 [French]). He is also Founding Director of the College of Jewish Studies at the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Paris, and Founding Editor of two journals: Pardès: A European Journal of Jewish Studies and Culture and Controverses, a journal of political ideas.

Dru Johnson, Associate Fellow

Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies at The King's College in New York City and a Visiting Professor at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis. He served as an IT manager and then pastor of 10 years in St. Louis, Missouri and St. Andrews, Scotland. He studied analytic philosophy at the University of Missouri (St. Louis), and his doctoral research at the University of St. Andrews explored epistemology in the Pentateuch and Mark's gospel. He has a forthcoming book called Getting It Wrong: A Biblical Theology of Knowing and Error (Wipf & Stock). He is married and has four children.

Miryam Brand, Post-Doctoral Fellow

Brand is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies and Religious Studies at Brown University, and holds a Ph.D. in Bible and Late Antiquity from New York University. Her book, Evil Within and Without: The Source of Sin and Its Nature as Portrayed in Second Temple Literature, is scheduled for publication in 2012 by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, and her introduction and commentary on 1 Enoch will be published in the forthcoming volume The Lost Bible: Ancient Jewish Writings Outside of Scripture, ed. Louis Feldman, James Kugel, and Lawrence Schiffman (New York: Jewish Publication Society).

Sam Lebens, Post-Doctoral Fellow

Lebens was awarded his doctorate by the University of London in 2010 for his thesis on Bertrand Russell's ill-fated Multiple Relation Theory of Judgement. His thesis research lead Lebens into various areas of study, including early analytic philosophy, realism and nominalism regarding universals, the metaphysics and epistemology of logic, and the philosophy of language. Since completing his PhD, Lebens has been living in Israel with his wife and children, and has been concentrating on classical Talmudic study in Rabbinical Seminaries. He comes to the Institute for Advanced Studies with the hope of combining his philosophical and Rabbinical education, focusing on the semantics and metaphysical commitments of narrative, as it pertains to Biblical and Rabbinical narratives, and on Talmudic approaches to the philosophy of time. Lebens is the chairperson of the newly formed Association for the Philosophy of Judaism (www.theapj.com).