Gabriel Levy

Gabriel Levy is a comparative historian of religion, specializing in Jewish studies. Gabriel Levy is Professor in the Science of Religion at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway, where he teaches on method and theory in the scientific study of religion, middle-eastern religious history with focus on Judaism, and the relation between religion, science, and technology. Gabriel’s research is devoted to the comparative history of religion, with specialty in Jewish studies. Gabriel studies religions from a holistic perspective and looks for ways to integrate the harder sciences into scholarship in the humanities. He studies the ways religious individuals and groups imagine their communicative relations with superhuman agents, and particularly how various technologies of mediation, such as divination and literacy, change the way this relation is organized and embodied. To do this he draws on anthropology, philosophy, and the mind sciences. His most recent book uses insights from biology and the mind sciences to explore the effects of literacy on religious cognition and the origins of Judaism. Gabriel has just begun research for his second book, which will develop the groundwork for an anomolous monist (D. Davidson) approach to religion and apply it to specific real world examples, including fictionality, the concept of life, kabbalistic information, comedy, animal agency, medicine, politics and intimacy.

 

Projects in Progress:

Religion and Behavioral Economy - with Panos Mitkidis

Religion and Health - with István Czachesz 

Zohar - with Elad Lapidot

Surveillance - with John Lardas Modern and Jason Bivins

Religion and Sports - with Vincent Biondo

 

Teaching:

- Masters (MA), Theoretical Approaches and Philosophy of Science in the Study of Religion 

- Masters (MA), Materials and Methods 

- Theories of Religion

- Religions of the Middle East (Judaism) 

- Upper Level Seminar on Cognitive Approaches to Religion