Description:

The Renée and Lester Crown Speaker Series

"S.Y. Agnon and Gustave Flaubert: Hebraizing a French Master"

Robert Alter, Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley

Robert Alter is Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967.   He has written widely on the European novel from the eighteenth century to the present, on American fiction, and on modern Hebrew literature.   He has also written extensively on literary aspects of the Bible. His completed translation of the Hebrew Bible with a commentary was published in 2018 in a three-volume set. In 2009 he received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for lifetime contribution to American letters and in 2013 the Charles Homer Haskins Prize for career achievement from the American Council of Learned Societies.  He has been given honorary degrees by Yale, Northwestern, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Jewish Theological Seminary, the University of Judaism and the University of Haifa.