Professor Jodi Magness
Dr. Jodi Magness is the Kenan Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence in Early Judaism in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She holds her degrees from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (BA) and the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D.). Prior to her tenure at UNC, Dr. Magness was a professor of classical and Near Eastern archaeology at Tufts University.
Her areas of expertise are the archaeology of Palestine in the Roman, Byzantine and early Islamic Periods, ancient pottery, ancient synagogues, Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Roman army in the East.
A trained archaeologist with more than 20 years of field experience, Professor Magness has excavated throughout Israel and in Greece and is currently the Co-Director of excavations at the Roman fort site of Yotvata, Israel. She has also excavated at Khirbet Yattir, Caesarea Maritima, the Athenian Agora, ancient Corinth and co-directed excavations of the Roman siege works at Masada in Israel.
For her engaging teaching, Professor Magness won the Archaeological Institute of America's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Her other honors include a Fulbright Lecturing Award from the United States–Israel Educational Foundation, and fellowships from institutions including the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Dr. Magness is the author of numerous scholarly books on the archaeology of the Holy Land. Among them are The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, which won the 2003 Biblical Archaeology Society's Award for Best Popular Book in Archaeology, and The Archaeology of the Early Islamic Settlement in Palestine, which won the Irene Levi-Sala Book Prize.
