David G.K. Taylor

David Taylor is the university lecturer in Aramaic and Syriac at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Wolfson College, where he attempts to persuade colleagues and students that their life will remain sadly incomplete without at least some knowledge of the delights of the 3000-year-old Aramaic culture. His primary research interests are in Syriac language, history, and literature, and in language contact in the Late Antique Near East. Whilst at ISAW he will be working on a monograph on multilingualism and diglossia in Late Antique Syria and Mesopotamia, and finishing some volumes on sixth-century Syriac psalm exegesis. Other recently completed research includes papers on desire and devotion in thirteenth-century Syriac wine songs, the formation of sixth-century Syrian Orthodox identity, Christ as levitical priest in early Syriac thought, a textual examination of the Syriac sources relating to the martyrs of Najran, and post-sixteenth-century European attempts to suppress or manipulate Syriac in Kerala.