Bruce E. Zuckerman is currently an associate professor in the School of Religion, where he teaches courses in the Hebrew Bible, the Bible in Western Literature, the Ancient Near East, and Archaeology. He received B.A. with honors in English from Princeton University, and his Ph.D. in ancient Near Eastern Languages from Yale University.
Professor Zuckerman is a specialist in Northwest Semitic languages. Besides his teaching responsibilities, he directs the USC Archaeological Research Collection. Through West Semitic Research, a partnership with his brother Ken, he specializes in photographing ancient texts including numerous projects involving the Dead Sea Scrolls. Zuckerman is a member of the Board of Advisors for the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation. His book, Job the Silent: A Study in Biblical Counterpoint, was published in 1991 by Oxford University Press.
He is the author of numerous scholarly articles; a co-editor of the Facsimile Edition of the Leningrad Codex; and the creator of numerous published photographs and exhibitions of ancient documents. His work has gained the support in the form of grants, prizes and awards-including a General Education Teaching Award in 1998, an Undergraduate Research Grant from the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences in 2001 to support mentored research by undergraduates in archaeology. In recognition of his achievement in and devotion to undergraduate education, he was made a Fellow in the Center for Excellence in Teaching in 2000.
Recently, CBS’s Sunday Morning program, the New York Times, and other publications have reported on Prof. Zuckerman’s efforts to digitize the images of ancient texts and analyze them using the most advanced computer imaging techniques. He is currently leading a project to disseminate electronic images of ancient texts through the West Semitic Research Project website. In cooperation with the USC Libraries and the University of Illinois he is developing InscriptiFact, an image database for scholarly distribution (www.inscriptifact.com).
