Jenna Kemp

Jenna Kemp is a lecturer in Hebrew Bible in the department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures. She holds an MA in biblical studies from the Graduate Theological Union (2014) and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley from the MELC department in the area of Hebrew Bible with a designated emphasis in Jewish Studies (2021). Before joining the faculty in MELC, she held a postdoc position at Universität Basel in the Theologische Fakultät (2021-2024), working on a project entitled “Transforming Memories of Collective Violence in the Hebrew Bible,” an Eccelenza research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. She has been an affiliated early career researcher in the international working group, “Renewed Philology,” since 2021.   

Her work blends philological approaches to the Bible with theoretical approaches to historiography, cultural memory, and literary culture. Her first book, Forgetting to Remember: Cultural Memory, Intertextuality, and Scribal Agency in the Hebrew Bible, theorizes the formation of biblical texts as a process of cultural memory. It is under contract with Mohr Siebeck in the Forschungen zum Alten Testament I series and is expected to be published by the end of 2024. Her research has also been published in journals such as Biblical Interpretation and Theologische Zeitschrift, and she has contributed public scholarship to forums such as SBL’s Bible Odyssey and Religion Dispatches. She also enjoys teaching in the Bay Area’s queer Jewish community.  

Her current book project focuses on the relationship between memory and futurity in relation to the mass annihilation (ḥērem) traditions in the book of Joshua. Namely, she is investigating how perceptions of incompletion and failure work to propel memories forward in time and to consider why these memories can shift in import from activation of the past toward management of the future. Some of the preliminary research has already been published in the article, “From Annihilation to Dispossession: Transforming Memories of חרם in the Book of Joshua.”