Prof. David Stern is Harry Starr Professor of Classical and Modern Hebrew and Jewish Literature at Harvard University. Stern received his Ph.D. from Harvard and taught for many years at the University of Pennsylvania before leaving for Harvard. Stern has written or edited fourteen books including Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature; Rabbinic Fantasies: Imaginative Narratives from Classical Hebrew Literature; The Monk’s Haggadah: A Fifteenth Century Illuminated Codex from the Monastery of Tegernsee; and The Jewish Bible: A Material History (University of Washington Press, 2017), for which he received the 2018 Jordan Schnitzer Award for the Best Book in Jews and the Arts from the Association for Jewish Studies. His most recent book is Jewish Literary Cultures II: The Medieval and Early Modern Periods (2019), the second in a series of three volumes of Stern’s selected essays. He is currently completing the third volume in the series. Stern works and teaches in two fields, classical Jewish literature and the history of the book with a special interest in the Jewish book.