The conference is intended to encourage regional HB scholars and PhD students to make or strengthen personal connections with one another. At the same time, we hope to highlight interdisciplinary, intercultural, and intertextual connections that many of us are making in our scholarship on the Hebrew Bible

The day will be prepared for by gathering responses from planned participants (both attendees and presenters) with 1-2 sentences giving a brief pointer to how they have found an interdisciplinary connection useful for their research or teaching. Those responses will be collected and circulated to attendees so they have an idea of who is at the conference and what they are interested in.

The January 2024 conference “Making Connections” will deepen and broaden the conversation of the Columbia Hebrew Bible seminar, allowing its members to connect with up-and-coming scholars of the region and also providing a full day-long opportunity for its more distant members (e.g. from Philadelphia, Princeton and New Haven) to benefit from a trip to the city. This conference will be meeting on the site of its co-sponsor, Union Theological Seminary in New York, which happens to have been the site where the Society of Biblical Literature met (as a whole) almost every year from the 1800’s into the late 1960’s. Recognizing the historic importance of Union as a meeting place for biblical scholarship and the importance of this conference.