Jeroen Verrijssen is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University’s Centre for Late Antiquity. He studied Hebrew lingustics and literature at the Faculty of Arts (KU Leuven) and afterwards completed his PhD in Religious Studies at the Faculty of Theology (KU Leuven). His doctoral research brought to a light the 'Liturgical Targum', a new textual tradition of the Targums (the Aramaic translation of the Hebrew Bible).
His current research explores genealogies and concepts of legacy in historiographical traditions of the first millennium, examining how they articulate political legitimacy, religious authority, and communal identity. This work is part of the broader New Polities project (PI: Peter Van Nuffelen), which aims to recover the formation, circulation, and adaptation of political ideas in the first millennium and to foreground the role of late antique and early medieval societies in the wider history of political thought.
His other research interests include medieval Judaism, Aramaic studies (in particular Targum), and textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible. He is editor and board member of the International Organization for Targumic Studies and Chairman of Ex Oriente Lux, a Belgian-Dutch academic organization that organizes lectures about the (Ancient) Near-East for a general public.
