Ilana Pardes is a Professor of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She taught at Princeton University and has been a visiting Professor at UC Berkeley. Her work has focused on the nexus of Bible, literature, and culture as well as on questions of aesthetics and hermeneutics. She is the author of Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach (Harvard University Press, 1992), The Biography of Ancient Israel: National Narratives in the Bible (University of California Press, 2000), Melville's Bibles (University of California, 2008); and Co-editor of New Perspectives on Freud's Moses and Monotheism (Niemeyer, 2006). Her current research focuses on the circulation of the Song of Songs in Israeli and American cultures.