Peter Machinist is on sabbatical in Germany...

Peter Machinist is on sabbatical  this year, 2013-2014, serving as a visiting professor (Gastprofessor) at the University of Munich, Germany in the university's Münchner Zentrum für Antike Welten, the interdiscplinary center for the study of antiquity. He is teaching two seminars, one in the fall, on the history of Hebrew Biblical scholarship, and the other in the spring, on Nahum and Assyria in biblical prophecy. He is also giving a set of four public lectures at the university through the course of the year on the challenges of the comparative study of cultures, with the Hebrew Bible as the case study. In November, 2013 he was honored at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in Baltimore with a symposium and the presentation of a Festschrift volume, Literature as Politics, Politics as Literature. Essays on the Ancient Near East in Honor of Peter Machinist, organized and edited by two former students, David S. Vanderhooft (Boston College) and Abraham Winitzer (University of Notre Dame). Machinist, in addition, gave an invited keynote lecture, on royal inscriptions in the Hebrew Bible,  at the January, 2014 meeting of the British Society of Old Testament Study, held at the University of Durham, Great Britain. Currently, he is working on a variety of articles on biblical literature and Mesopotamian history, and a volume of commentary on the biblical book of Nahum.