Ilana Pardes is the Katharine Cornell Professor of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Director of the Center for Literary Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley in 1990. She taught at Princeton University in 1990-1992 and as Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley in 1996 and in 2006, and at Harvard in 2012. During the fall of 2009 she was a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. In fall of 2017 she was a fellow at the Humanities Council at Princeton University. Her work has focused on the nexus of Bible, literature, and culture as well as on questions of gender, aesthetics and hermeneutics. She is the author of Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach (Harvard University Press, 1992), The Biography of Ancient Israel: National Narratives in the Bible (University of California Press, 2000), Melville's Bibles (University of California, 2008); Agnon's Moonstruck Lovers: The Song of Songs in Israeli Culture (The Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies, University of Washington Press, 2013), The Song of Songs: A Biography (Princeton University Press, Lives of Great Religious Books, 2019), and Ruth: The Migrant Gleaner (Yale University Press, Jewish Lives, 2022).