Dr Esther-Miriam Wagner

Dr Wagner is a Research Associate at the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, working Judaeo-Arabic and Arabic manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah. She graduated in 2001 with a first class Magistra Artium degree in Semitic Philology, Islamic Studies and Indo-European Studies from the Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena/Germany. During her studies, she spent a year as a visiting student at the Victoria University of Manchester, and was involved in the editing and publication of the JBVO and EFAH series.

After completing her Master's degree, she worked on a joint project with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (funded by the German-Israeli Foundation) on Yiddish syntax before completing a PhD in 2007 at the University of Cambridge about the language of mediaeval Judaeo-Arabic letters under the supervision of Prof Geoffrey Khan, which turned into a book, published by Brill.

Together with Laura Wright and Bettina Beinhoff, she organises the Sociolinguistics Seminar Series (2011–ongoing) at the University of Cambridge. In April 2011, she held an interdisciplinary conference ‘Scribes as agents of language change’, which focused on the role of individuals and scribal schools in the spread of language change in society. The forthcoming conference volume (currently in press) will be the first in a new Mouton de Gruyter series about language change. From March 2012 she is responsible, together with Dr Maria Angeles Gallego, for Cartas de Sefarad, a series of lectures in the Casa Sefarad in Madrid, exploring the subject of Jews under Muslim rule in Spain, which will culminate in an exhibition opening in December 2012 and an edited volume.

Her main research interests include Judaeo-Arabic, Yiddish, the diachronic language change of Arabic, Arabic dialectology and language typology of Jewish languages.

Dr Wagner is a College Research Associate of St John's College, Cambridge, where she organises the monthly Young Researchers Pre-Dinner Lecture Series (2008-ongoing).

Dr Wagner is currently involved with a number of historical and linguistic research projects. Together with Dotan Arad from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, she is writing a monograph on the activities of 15th-century Alexandrian traders, providing editions of previously unpublished letters from the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and describing the life of the Jewish elite in Egypt and neighbouring countries as reflected in the sources, complete with a linguistic analysis of the Judaeo-Arabic and Hebrew language varieties used. With Maria Angeles Gallego of the CSIC in Madrid, she is working on an edited volume on Jewish life in Muslim Spain as reflected in Genizah sources, which will include an introduction and articles based on the various papers given by Prof Mark Cohen, Prof Mordechai Friedman, Peter Cole and Adina Hoffman in our lecture series ‘Letters from Sefarad’ in Madrid. Her other current research projects are concerned with an edition of 18th–19th century merchants’ correspondence from Egypt and North Africa, together with Geoffrey Khan, and a sociolinguistic investigation into general traders’ languages around the Mediterranean.