Theology professor Eugene Ulrich has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for the 2014–15 academic year.
The fellowships continue Notre Dame’s record success with the NEH, which supports advanced research across a broad spectrum of the humanities. Since 1999, Arts and Letters faculty members have been awarded 51 total NEH grants — more than any other university in the country.
Ulrich, Rev. John A. O’Brien Professor of Theology Emeritus, is one of the world’s leading scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of ancient texts discovered after World War II in caves along the shore of the Dead Sea near Jerusalem. He also specializes in areas of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Septuagint.
Ulrich received this latest NEH fellowship for his work “Second Isaiah: A Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible.” This edition, he said, is “made possible by the rich and surprising learnings these scrolls have taught us about the early stages of biblical composition — what we now know about the Bible that we didn’t 60 years ago.A recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim fellowship as well as several previous NEH grants, Ulrich has spent virtually his entire academic career editing and studying the Dead Sea Scrolls — arguably the greatest archeological find of the 20th century. In 1977, he received an NEH fellowship to publish his first Dead Sea Scroll, a scroll of the Book of Samuel.
“This new book will be the first critical Hebrew edition of the major prophet whose work so greatly influenced both the Jewish Scrolls community and early Christianity.”
A member of the translation teams for both the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible and the “New American Bible: Revised Edition,” Ulrich also co-authored “The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible.” He is one of the three general editors of the Scrolls International Publication Project and chief editor of the Biblical Scrolls. He published six volumes of critical editions of the biblical scrolls in “Discoveries in the Judaean Desert,” and he was an Area Editor for Oxford’s “Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
Ulrich, who was accorded emeritus status in 2014, is a past president of the Catholic Biblical Association of America and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Originally published by at al.nd.edu on July 02, 2014.