Shamma Boyarin

Shamma Boyarin is a professor in the English Department at the University of Victoria, with a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (Hebrew and Arabic) from UC Berkeley. He explores the relationship between Hebrew and Arabic in the Middle Ages-particularly in a literary context-and the interplay between discourses that we identify as a religious or as secular. His scholarship and teaching also look at the way current pop culture engages with the Middle Ages and Religion- especially in the complex arena of global Heavy Metal. Both in his work on the Middle Ages and on contemporary matters, he is influenced by scholarly approaches that interrogate what seem like binary oppositions and hard drawn boundaries between categories.