Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky

Dr. Itay Marienberg-Milikovsky is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Hebrew Literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), Israel, and the founder and head of the BGU Literary Lab. He is also the co-founder and co-head of the BGU Environmental Humanities Research Centre. He conducted his postdoctoral research at the University of Hamburg (2016–2019), and was a visiting scholar at Potsdam University (2022 and 2024). His areas of expertise include Talmudic literature, narratology, computational literary studies, and ecocriticism.

His publications include: We Know Not What has Become of Him: Literature and Meaning in Talmudic Aggada (Bar-Ilan University Press, 2016); and Words to Count: First Steps in Computational Literary Studies (The Open University of Israel Press, 2022), the first book-length publication in Digital Humanities in Hebrew.

Dr. Marienberg-Milikovsky is currently engaged in several projects. His main project is an eight-year study aimed at mapping and comprehensively analyzing all narrated materials in the Babylonian Talmud and the Yerushalmi (also known as the Palestinian Talmud). This project will produce a first-of-its-kind literary database of all Talmudic stories and a book on the rise of narrativity in this corpus. Additionally, he is currently writing a series of articles that offer an ecological reading of Talmudic literature. 

Itay will participate in the Taube Center's inaugural cohort of Jewish Studies Fellows, sharing his research while serving as Visiting Scholar Affiliate with the Stanford Humanities Center