Brian Ogren

St. Mary's College of Maryland

Kabbalistic notions of time in Italian Renaissance thought

2011-2012: Spring

Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Culture and Religion

Brian Ogren is a scholar of religion with a concentration on Jewish thought in the Italian Renaissance. He was raised in California, was educated in the United States and in Israel, and has spent extensive periods of time studying in Europe. Similar to his own personal trajectories between worlds, his intellectual concentration has been upon the flow and reception of ideas among diverse intellectual communities. He has examined issues of change and continuity in the thought of learned Jews and Christians, including their modes of argumentation as a means of shaping identity. He is attracted to themes of center and margin, interior and exterior, and differing notions of time, space, and self. As a fellow at the Italian Academy, Brian will be exploring kabbalistic concepts of cyclical time in Italian Renaissance thought. This is an ongoing project that examines the construction of history, as well as the usage of eschatology, for polemical purposes related to differing ideas of "messianism."