Near Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley

[HustleAndFlow]

Looking for some information on this program at Berkeley. I don't know much about the UC system, so I have a couple questions:

• How close is Boyarin to retirement?
• Would this department accept someone interested in early Judaism/early Christianity? Or would that interest make more sense in the Ancient History department?

If anyone on here has any information, that would be helpful. Thanks!

[sacklunch]

From what I understand NES at UCB is fairly stagnant. Boyarin is almost certainly not taking students at this point, though he may still be teaching a bit (Emeritus?). You would be better off looking into Stanford (RS), I think, though they just lost a key scholar in the area to UPenn this year. I know nothing about their Ancient History Dept. except to say that it is known to be excellent. Unless they have faulty which specifically work in EJ/EC, however, I don't think they would take such a student unless s(he) has a heavy amount of classical language background (and even if one were accepted she would be expected to be at a doctoral level in those languages, as well as Hebrew/Aramaic).