About Me

Barry Scott Wimpfheimer is the Director of The Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies and an Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Law at Northwestern University. He is the author of Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories and the forthcoming The Talmud: A Biography in Princeton University Press’ series “Lives of Great Religious Books.” A native New Yorker, Wimpfheimer received rabbinic ordination from Yeshiva University and earned a Ph.D. in Religion from Columbia University, where his 2005 dissertation was awarded the Salo and Jeanette Baron Prize in Jewish Studies. Before joining Northwestern, he served as a Malvin and Lea Bank Early Career Professor at Penn State and a Harry Starr Fellow at Harvard. In 2011-2012, he was a Fellow at the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern. Outside of academia, Wimpfheimer enjoys singing, playing basketball, and practicing yoga.