Sergey Dolgopolski came to the the Department of Comparative Literature and The Institute of Jewish Thought and Heritage in 2010. He holds a Joint Ph.D. in Jewish Studies from UC Berkeley and Graduate Theological Union, and the degree of Doctor of Philosophical Sciences from the Russian Academy of Sciences. His general area of interest is the variety of ways in which philosophy and literature interact creating new philosophical concepts and new literary forms. He specializes in the Talmud as body of text and thought seen from poetic, rhetoric, and philosophical perspectives, with a particular interest in mutual hermeneutics of philosophical, rhetorical, and talmudic traditions, and with an emphasis on mutually shaping engagements of poetic, talmudic, and philosophical thinking. He authors a monograph Rhetoric of the Talmud in the View of Post-Structuralism (1998, St-Petersburg and Jerusalem, in Russian). One of his books is What is Talmud? The Art of Disagreement (Fordham U. Press, 2009). His new book The Open Past: Subjectivity and Remembering in the Talmud, with Fordham University Press, was published in the Fall 2012. Please view it here: http://fordhampress.com/index.php/the-open-past-cloth.html The book isolates and critically analyses thinking and remembering practices in Babylonian Talmud in the context of philosophical and rhetorical disciplines of thinking and remembering. He is at the beginning stages of a new book-length project on comparative poetics and phenomenology of thinking in the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds in the scope of the broader traditions of political thinking in literature.