Dennis Pardee appointed to a named chair

CONGRATULATIONS TO DENNIS PARDEE, who has been promoted to a named chair at the University of Chicago. Press release:

Dennis Pardee has been appointed the Henry Crown Professor in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations.

Currently Professor in Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, Pardee studies northwest Semitic languages and is a leading scholar of Ugarit, the language spoken by the residents of the ancient Syrian city. He is the author of two–volume scholarly translation of Ugaritic rituals, many of which had been difficult for scholars to access before the publication of Pardee’s translation.

In 2008, Pardee translated the inscription on an ancient stone slab uncovered by an Oriental Institute team in southeast Turkey. The slab provided the first written evidence in the belief that the soul was separate from the body.

Pardee teaches intermediate and advanced Biblical Hebrew, and is a 2010 recipient of the University’s Graduate Teaching Award. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1995. In 2007 he delivered the British Academy’s prestigious Schweich Lectures on Biblical Archaeology.

He received his Ph.D. from UChicago in 1974 and has been teaching at UChicago since 1972.

Via the The Oriental Institute: Fragments for a History of an Institution blog via Christopher Rollston on Facebook. I have noted Professor Pardee's work on the new Zincirli inscription (a.k.a. the Kuttamuwa's Soul inscription) here and here.

UPDATE: Blog name corrected in last paragraph. Sorry about that.