Drew Longacre, PhD: New Project Coordinator and Specialist for Ancient Hebrew Paleography
We are excited to announce that Dr. Drew Longacre will be joining the MIKRA Hebrew paleography team as our new Paleographic Project Coordinator and Specialist for Ancient Hebrew Paleography.
Drew adds an ancient specialization to our Hebrew paleography team already strong in medieval and modern Hebrew paleography. Thanks to this addition, our team will have specialists representing the full spectrum of Hebrew paleographical study.
About Drew
Drew is a specialist in the texts and manuscripts of the Hebrew and Greek Bibles, with over a decade of professional research and publication experience. He completed his doctoral dissertation in 2015 on the Dead Sea Scrolls and is an expert in the study of Hebrew paleography and ancient Torah scrolls. Drew has completed several major research projects:
In 2022, he was the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, working on identifying different Dead Sea Scrolls written by the same scribes.
From 2016 – 2021, he was the postdoctoral researcher at the University of Groningen on the European Research Council project “The Hands that Wrote the Bible: Digital Palaeography and Scribal Culture of the Dead Sea Scrolls” (principal investigator: Mladen Popović), which used radiocarbon dating and digital paleographic tools to assess the development of ancient Hebrew handwriting.
In 2015, Drew was the Educational and Cultural Affairs Junior Research Fellow at the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, working on reconstructing fragmentary ancient Torah scrolls.
From 2014 – 2016, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki’s Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in Changes in Sacred Texts and Traditions, studying ancient Greek fragments of the Torah.
Currently, Drew is helping us to finish an analysis of a composite Russian-Polish scroll and is gearing up to begin work on an oriental Torah scroll. With working language skills in: English, Hebrew, Greek, German, French, Dutch, and Aramaic, he’ll add a helpful diversity to the team.
He has known MIKRA founder Brian Rickett for over 15 years and shares MIKRA’s goals for scholarly study of the Bible and educating the general public about its continuing religious and cultural significance. Drew began working with MIKRA in 2022. For Drew’s fuller CV along with sample articles and papers, please visit his Academia.edu page here.
If you have a manuscript or manuscript project and would like to contract or collaborate with MIKRA, we invite you to connect with Dr. Longacre here. For a paleographical sample, see here.