Building on my work in The Making of Israel, my current research concerns the relationship between Israel and Judah, trying to understand the way that the biblical texts speak to and about these two entities. My long-term goal is to improve our understanding of the nature, origins, and history of Israel and Judah, and to do this by approaching the biblical and extra-biblical texts through an interdisciplinary lens: integrating textual analysis and archaeological data with social-scientific research on the construction and development of identity narratives in response to social and political change.

Most recently this work has been focused on the effect of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians on Israelite and Judahite identities. My attention has been on the books of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and on bringing in insights from the social sciences to understand the ways that these prophetic traditions understand what Israel and Judah are. Current research on trauma and forced migration, including the impact of migration on narratives about the past and on relationships to the homeland, has proved enormously helpful, as have analyses of imperial domination and its effect on native identities, including the amalgamation of disparate socio-economic classes and the invocation (or invention) of unifying traditions in the face of colonial power. Israel and Judah Redefined, published in 2021 with Cambridge University Press, represents a major milestone in this project; earlier, a related article won the David Noel Freedman Award for Excellence and Creativity in Hebrew Bible Scholarship from the Society of Biblical Literature.

The first stage of this project was funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung/Foundation, thanks to which I was able to spend eight months as a visiting research fellow at the University of Göttingen conducting a close study of Jeremiah, testing and refining my methodology. (In the process I also wrote An Introduction to the Study of Jeremiah, which appeared with Bloomsbury in 2017.) Recent visiting scholarships at St John’s College, Oxford and the Gladstone Library allowed me to extend the investigation into Ezekiel, and I spent 2018 working on the project in Cambridge, as the S.A. Cook Bye-Fellow at Gonville and Caius College.