Dr. Dylan Johnson

I'm doing very well.

How are you?

Right.

In a very circuitous way.

I started university wanting to do history.

I always knew I was going to do something with history.

in a tiny little liberal arts college in Canada, which is where I'm from, hence the accent.

And basically one of the great opportunities they had there were archaeological field schools in the Near East.

So this kind of got me over there, interested in the region of Israel-Palestine,

Iraq, that whole area, basically.

Then I just followed it through grad school, did a master's degree at Harvard, did my PhD at NYU.

And now through other various circuitous routes, found myself in the UK teaching at the University of Cardiff.

So yeah, just one of those opportunities that you kind of jump at.

And that's what led me to this really.

Well, first, that it is history.

I mean, when my earliest encounters with the Bible were in Sunday school as a kid, so I never really thought of it in terms of as an historical source.

So these two aspects of my life were kind of compartmentalized, kept apart.

And it was only through encountering a couple scholars, a couple people in my undergraduate degree that I started to think, oh, actually, you know, this text, at least the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible that I study, has these really deep connections to really deep antiquity.

And this region that I just find incredibly fascinating, that region being the ancient Middle East or the Near East, however you describe it.

And then just seeing these parallels.