Barry Scott Wimpfheimer

Assistant Professor of Religion

Department of Religious Studies

 
Office: Crowe Hall, 1860 Campus Drive, 5-174 
Phone: (847) 491-2618 
E-mail: barry@northwestern.edu  

Barry Scott Wimpfheimer specializes in Rabbinic Judaism and, more specifically, the Babylonian Talmud. In addition to the Bachelor’s, Master’s and Ph.D. degrees he earned at Columbia University, he also received a Master’s degree and rabbinic ordination (semikha) from Yeshiva University. While a student at Yeshiva University, Wimpfheimer was a Wexner Graduate Fellow. His doctoral dissertation entitled “Legal Narratives in the Babylonian Talmud” was submitted to Columbia’s Department of Religion in 2005, and was awarded the Salo and Jeanette Baron Prize in Jewish Studies in 2007. 

Upon graduating Columbia, Wimpfheimer was appointed Mal and Lea Bank Early Career Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of History and Religious Studies at Penn State. Wimpfheimer spent Spring 2006 in residence at Harvard University as a Harry Starr Fellow at the Harvard University Center for Jewish Studies. In 2006, Wimpfheimer joined Northwestern University as Assistant Professor of Religion and Law. Since 2005, Wimpfheimer has been an Associate Editor of Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History; he is editing a Special Issue (appearing in 2010) entitled “Law and Literature.” 

Wimpfheimer’s work focuses on the Babylonian Talmud as a work of law and literature. His work on the Talmud’s legal stories expands the legal context of reading by taking into account the cultural concerns that a statutory treatment of law often suppresses. The result of such an expansion is a thicker description of Jewish law and an illuminating window onto rabbinic Judaism.  

Wimpfheimer teaches courses on various topics related to Judaism including “Introduction to Judaism,” “The Art of Rabbinic Narrative,” and “From Esoterica to US Weekly: Kabbalah and Popular Culture.”

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