SERGEY DOLGOPOLSKI holds a Joint Ph.D. in Jewish Studies from UC Berkeley and Graduate Theological Union, and the degree of Doctor of Philosophical Sciences from the Russian Academy of Sciences. He specializes in the Talmud, Interpretation, and Jewish Thought both classical and contemporary. He authors a monograph Rhetoric of the Talmud in the View of Post-Structuralism (1998, St-Petersburg and Jerusalem, in Russian). His new book What is Talmud? The Art of Disagreement is forthcoming with the Fordham University Press. He came to KU Lawrence as an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies in the Fall 2006.  He had previously taught Jewish Studies at UC Davis, University of San Francisco, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, and conducted research in Jewish Studies as Mellon Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at UC Berkeley.

Dolgopolski is currently working on two interconnected interdisciplinary book length projects. One is tentatively titled "Is Media Always Technology?"(Please see an abstract here) and is in the field of new media and rabbinic interpretation. Drawing on anthropological aspects of Sergei Eiesenstein' montage principle in early modernist film theory, Dolgopolski focuses on the role of montage in the relationship between mediation, interpretation, and technology in various instances of traditonal and academic interpretation of the Talmud in modernity. The second project is currently in a beginning stage. With the working title "Hermenutics of Anonymity", it explores the role of montage in transition from philosophical hermeneutics of intellect to exegesis of scripture in Late Antiquity in light of consequent traditions of hermeneutics and exegesis.