Dr David Torollo

After completing his doctorate at the University of Salamanca in 2014, he held positions as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the ALIENTO project at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris (2014) and as a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Shalom Spiegel Institute for Medieval Hebrew Poetry at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York (2015-2016). From 2016 until joining King's he was a Lecturer in Spanish at the Cervantes Institute in Tel Aviv and Cairo. Before taking up this lectureship in 2020, he has been a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at King’s since October 2019.

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Medieval Iberia
• Cultural Translation (Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, Judeo-Arabic)
• Wisdom Literature and didactic texts
• Sacred Texts of Judaism, Islam and Christianity

David's current major project is ‘The Boundaries of Wisdom: The Circulation of Practical Ethics among Jews, Muslims and Christians in the Medieval Mediterranean’. For more details, please visit his profile at the Language Acts and Worldmaking project website (https://languageacts.org/travelling-concepts/travelling-concepts-projects/boundaries-wisdom/).

Teaching 

My teaching is informed by my research interests, and my classes function as an educational meeting point to test and develop my ideas. Pivotal to my teaching is the concept that language is the most powerful human tool that shapes our perception and understanding of the world and that conditions our individual and collective identities. I explore and teach texts in Castilian, Arabic, Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Spanish. I am involved in the teaching of modules such as ‘Language Acts and Worldmaking in Premodern Spain’ or ‘Sepharad: The Jews of Medieval Spain’. In addition, I also teach on our first-year core modules, ‘Global Iberias’ and ‘Cultural Transformations’, as well as contribute to our core Spanish language module, specialising in translation.

Selected publication

• Mishle he-‘arav: La tradición sapiencial hebrea en la Península Ibérica y Provenza, s. XII y XIII. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2021.
• “The Story of the Female Jewish Wine Merchant: An Example of Cultural Translation in Medieval Hebrew Literature.” His Pen and Ink Are a Powerful Mirror: Andalusi and Other Near Eastern Studies in Honor of Ross Brann on His 70^thBirthday, eds. Adam Bursi, S.J. Pearce, and Hamza M. Zafer, 329-349. Leiden: Brill, 2020.
• With Isabelle Levy, “Romance Literature in Hebrew Language with an Arabic Twist: The First Story of Jacob ben El‘azar’s Sefer ha-meshalim.” La Corónica 45:2 (2017): 279-304.
• With Oded Zinger, “From an Arab Queen to a Yiddische Mama: The Travels of Marital Advice Around the Medieval Mediterranean.” Medieval Encounters 22:5 (2016): 471-516.
• “El conde Lucanor, ¿una colección de maqāmāt en castellano?”, eHumanista: Journal of Iberian Studies 33 (2016): 330-347.
• “Wisdom Literature in Judeo-Arabic: Kitāb maḥāsin al-’ādāb [The Book of Excellent Conduct]”, Memorabilia 17 (2015): 90-114.