Julia Rubanovich

Born in Tallinn, Estonia, Julia Rubanovich spent her undergraduate years at the St-Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) university, where she studied Iranian philology. After immigration to Israel, she completed her undergraduate, graduate and PhD studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, earning her PhD degree in classical Persian literature in 2005. She was a post-doctoral Rothschild fellow (2004-2005) at the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations of the University of Toronto. Julia Rubanovich started her teaching career while still an undergraduate student in 1993. Since then she has been teaching a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in Iranian cultural history, medieval and modern Persian literature and language.

Her research focuses on medieval Persian literature with an emphasis on epic poetry, including Shāhīn’s oeuvre in the Judeo-Persian language; on folk literature, notably prose dāstāns, and the problem of medieval orality; on the Alexander-Romance in the Islamic domain; and more recently on literary paratexts and the concepts of authorship in connection with the notion of literary canon.

Her recent publications include an edited volume Orality and Textuality in the Iranian World: Patterns of interaction across the centuries (Brill, 2015); ʻRe-Writing the Episode of Alexander and Candace in Medieval Persian Literature,ʼ in Alexander the Great in the Middle Ages: Transnational Perspectives, ed. Markus Stock (Toronto University Press, 2015); ʻWhy So Many Stories? Untangling the Versions of Iskandar’s Birth and Upbringing,ʼ in Orality and Textuality in the Iranian World: Patterns of interaction across the centuries, ed. J. Rubanovich (Brill, 2015); ʻOrality in Medieval Persian Literature,ʼ in Medieval Oral Literature, ed. Karl Reichl (De Gruyter, 2012); ʻTracking the Shahnama Tradition in Medieval Persian Folk Prose,ʼ Shahnama Studies II, ed. Charles Melville and G.R. van den Berg (Brill, 2012).