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Ahuvia Kahane is a British academic working in Ireland, specializing in the study of Greek and Roman antiquity, its traditions and the relations between the ancient world and modern culture and thought. Kahane is the 17th Regius Professor of Greek at Dublin, the A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture and Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. He is also Senior Associate at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of Oxford.

Scholarly work

Kahane's work addresses questions of form and content, continuity and change, authority and the ethics of literary reflection. He has made contributions to the study of Greco-Roman antiquity and early Greek epic, orality and oral traditions, literary history, modern poetry and poetics, visual culture and modern art, Hebrew studies, lexicography, sociology and anthropology, translation and translation studies.

Early and personal life

Ahuvia Kahane was born on an agricultural commune (kibbutz), Ramat Yohanan in the north of Israel to Reuven Kahane (1931-2003), a professor of sociology, Fellow of the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace and Saul Robinson Chair at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Orna, née Smirin, an artist and editor who, following a divorce, married Magnum Photos photographer Micha Bar-Am. Kahane's grandparents were among the founders of the kibbutzim movement and of Beit Alpha and Kineret in northern Israel. His paternal grandfather, David Kahane, served in Ben Gurion's government. In 1960, Ahuvia Kahane left the kibbutz with his father, who had remarried the educator Israela, née Shochat. He attended Rehavia school in Jerusalmen and Cornell School in Berkeley, California. As a teenager, Kahane was a member of Mazpen (‘Compass’) a socialist, anti-Zionist organization that had splintered from the Israeli Communist Party. Kahane left Israel in 1984. He married Georgina Calvert-Lee, a barrister, in 1992. They have three children, Berenike, Erasmus and Lysander. Kahane is a Freeman of the City of Durham, England.

Academic career

Kahane studied Greek and Latin in the Department of Classics at the University of Tel-Aviv, working with linguist H. B. Rosen [he], John Glucker and other scholars and obtaining a B.A. in 1983. During this time Kahane also worked closely with many contemporary artists, poets and writers, editing various works including, e.g. the Hebrew language versions of Daphnis and Chloe (by J. Bronowski) and Polybius' Histories (by B. Shimron), translating and publishing in literary journals such as Siman Kriah [he], Achshav (‘עכשיו’) and Prosa (magazine) [he]. As an undergraduate he was commissioned by Jerusalem publishers Keter to translate Homer's epics from Greek to Hebrew (though publication was much delayed, Keter 1996). Kahane completed his D.Phil. at Balliol College, Oxford (1990 supervised by Jasper Griffin), where, between 1987 and 1990 he was also sometime Lecturer in Classics. During this period Kahane also became associated with the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and began work with N. S. Doniach, OBE and a team of lexicographers at Oxford University Press on the Oxford English-Hebrew Dictionary, a project which he co-edited with Doniach and brought to completion shortly after Doniach's death in 1996.

In 1990 Kahane became a Junior Research Fellow at St. Cross College, Oxford and at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and in 1993 a Junior Fellow at Harvard University's Center for Hellenic Studies. In 1994 he was appointed Assistant Professor of Classics at Northwestern University where he was tenured as Associate Professor (2000) and later (2003) appointed Chairman of the Department of Classics. During this period Kahane maintained an appointment as Senior Associate at the Centre for Hebrew Studies in Oxford. He co-founded (1998, with S. Sara Monoson) the Classical Traditions Initiative at Northwestern and worked closely with the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. In 2004 Kahane took up the appointment of Professor of Classics at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he was also associate director of the University of London Institute in Paris (2006-8), Director of the Humanities and Arts Research Institute (2005–11), Head of the Classics Department (2012-2015) and co-director of the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome (2007–19). Kahane was appointed Regius Professor of Greek (1761) and A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture in 2019 and was made a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin in 2020.

Publications

• The Gods in Greek Hexameter Poetry and Beyond (edited with J. Clauss and M. Cuypers) (2016) Stuttgart: F. Steiner Verlag. ISBN ISBN 978-3-515-11523-0
• Homer: Guide for the Perplexed (2012) London: Continuum/Bloomsbury. ISBN 9781441173065
• Social Order and Informal Codes (in Hebrew), with T. Rappoport, (2012) Jerusalem: Resling Publishers.
• Antiquity and the Ruin Revue européenne d'histoire Vol. 18.5-6 (2011), (special double-issue).
• Diachronic Dialogues: Continuity and Authority in Homer and the Homeric Tradition in series "Greek Studies, Interdisciplinary Approaches" (2005), (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
• A Companion to the Prologue to Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (edited with A. J. W. Laird) (2001) Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• The Chicago Homer with M. Mueller, C. Berry W. Parod (2000) Evanston, IL: Northwestern University.
• Written Voices, Spoken Signs: Tradition, Performance and the Epic Text (edited with E. J. Bakker) (1997) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• The Oxford English Hebrew Dictionary (edited with N. S. Doniach) (1996) (Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Homer: Odyssey (in Hebrew) (1996) (Jerusalem: Keter Publishers).
• The Interpretation of Order: A Study in the Poetics of Homeric Repetition (1994) (Oxford: Oxford University Press 9780198140771.

References

1. "Ahuvia Kahane - Department of Classics - Trinity College Dublin". Trinity College Dublin. Retrieved 12 July 2020.
2. "Fellowship - Fellows & Scholars : Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin, Ireland".
3. "מוזיאון ישראל מרכז מידע לאמנות ישראלית - תערוכות: בר עם, אורנה". museum.imj.org.il (in Hebrew).
4. "התכתבות בנושא שחרור חבר קיבוץ לעבודה במקורות, ספטמבר 1950. תיק ג/5496/1". toldotofakim.cet.ac.il.
5. "יזרעאלה כהנא". new.huji.ac.il.
6. "Georgina Calvert-Lee — McAllister Olivarius". mcolaw.com. Archived from the original on 4 January 2015. Retrieved 18 June 2024.
7. "Current Membership at January 2019 - Durham City Freemen". www.durhamcityfreemen.org.
8. Gdowski, Jessica (21 October 2002). "Panel says history has an impact on present". The Daily Northwestern. Retrieved 18 June 2024.
9. Then named 'The Humanities and Arts Research Centre' (HARC). See https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/research-and-teaching/research/research-environment/research-institutes-and-centres/humanities-and-arts-research-institute/. For recordings of events and talks during this period, see Backdoor Broadcasting Company archives, https://backdoorbroadcasting.net/archive-v2/
10. Kahane, Ahuvia (2016). The Gods of Greek Hexameter Poetry. Berlin: F. Steiner. ISBN 978-3-515-11523-0.
11. Kahane, Ahuvia (2012). Homer, A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Bloomsbury. ISBN 9781441179463.
12. Kahane, Ahuvia (2012). סדר חברתי והקוד הבלתי פורמלי. Tel Aviv.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
13. Rapoport, T., Kahane, A. "Order and Chaos Conference, HUJI 23 July 2012". YouTube. Retrieved 13 July 2020.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
14. Kahane, Ahuvia (2012). "Antiquity and the Ruin". European Review of History: Revue Européenne d'Histoire. 18 (5–6). Taylor and Francis: 631–644. doi:10.1080/13507486.2011.618315. S2CID 162387435.
15. kahane, Ahuvia (2005). Diachronic Dialogues. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. ISBN 978-0-7391-1133-8.
16. Kahane, Ahuvia (2000). A Companion to the Prologue of Apuleius' Metamorphoses. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198152385.
17. Kahane, Ahuvia. "The Chicago Homer". The Chicago Homer. Retrieved 12 July 2020.
18. Clark, Matthew (1998). "Written Voices, Spoken Signs: Tradition, Performance, and the Epic Text. Edited by Egbert Bakker, Ahuvia Kahane". Phoenix. 52 (3/4): 370–373. doi:10.2307/1088678. JSTOR 1088678.
19. Ullendorff, Edward (1997). "The Near and Middle East - N. S. Doniach and A. Kahane (ed.): The Oxford English–Hebrew dictionary". Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. 60 (3): 557–559. doi:10.1017/S0041977X00032717. S2CID 162492665.
20. Kahane, Ahuvia (1996). הומרוס: אודיסיאה. Jerusalem: Keter Publishers.
21. kahane, Ahuvia (1994). The Interpretation of Order: A Study in the Poetics of Homeric Repetition. Clarendon Press. ISBN 9780198140771.

External links

• The Chicago Homer, website of the Chicago Homer project
• Ancient Culture Lab: Homer's Experience and the Greek Language, Trinity Elective
• Heroic Fate and Homer's Iliad, The Academy of Ideas
• The Jewish Ruin, British Museum, 1 March 2011
• Order and Chaos. A Conference at the Hebrew University, June 23, 2012.

• Living people
• British classical scholars
• Fellows of Trinity College Dublin
• Israeli emigrants to the United Kingdom
• 1957 births
• Tel Aviv University alumni
• Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford
• Northwestern University faculty