Oliver Geffen is a first-year DPhil student in Theology and Religion under the supervision of Professor Hindy Najman. His doctorate is an interdisciplinary project where he will work on the figure of the translator as a social critic in Jewish antiquity and on the traces of this tradition in modern Hebrew writing.
An epidemiologist by background, Oliver spent most of the last decade working in public health in the UK and internationally. However, during the lockdown period he began collaborating with Professor Nicholas de Lange at the University of Cambridge on the translation of the 1958 novel Days of Ziklag by S. Yizhar, a project that is expected to be completed in the next two years. With his growing interest in the Jewish history and traditions of literary translation, Oliver came to Oxford to pursue an MSt in Jewish Studies in 2023. His dissertation, supervised by Professor Adriana X. Jacobs, was about the interpretative power of translation in Days of Ziklag, and how the convergence of Biblical and rabbinic references with a modern Israeli text subverted each other and underpinned this novel’s power to deliver social critiques. He completed his MSt with distinction.
Oliver recently presented a paper at the Association of Israel Studies conference about his translation of A Ruined Garden by Esther Raab, where he discussed the uncertain fate of a human-made Garden of Eden in the context of the vagaries of war.