BA
Joseph Harrison is a second-year MPhil student writing his thesis on the translation and reception of obscure and mythical animals in the MT, LXX, and Vulgate. His interests include Hebrew poetry, the LXX, the Vulgate, and Philo, having written his first year MPhil essays on portrayals of David in the MT, LXX, and Dead Sea Scrolls, military imagery in the Song of Songs, and the numerological treatment of the number seven in Philo’s de Opificio Mundi, with his main essay this year examining the poetic merits of the structuring of Hebrew alphabetic acrostics.
He has been a regular and active participant in the Philo reading group organised jointly between OCSB and the Classics faculty, and has presented findings from his research on Philo and Psalm 151 at the ‘Philo as Reader’ seminar series and the Oxford-Helsinki LXX day respectively. He intends to continue his studies in Philo at a doctoral level, comparing the conceptualisation of cities in Philo with those in Classical and Hellenistic Greek texts and Second Temple Jewish texts.