Jenna Kemp

Jenna Kemp

Jenna Kemp holds an MA in biblical studies from the Graduate Theological Union (2014) and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in the area of Hebrew Bible with a designated emphasis in Jewish Studies (2021). Before joining the faculty at SCU, she held a postdoc position at Universität Basel, working on a project entitled “Transforming Memories of Collective Violence in the Hebrew Bible.” She has been an affiliated early career researcher in the international working group, “Renewed Philology,” since 2021. Kemp has taught graduate and undergraduate courses at UC Berkeley, the Graduate Theological Union, Universität Basel, as well as adult ed courses in the East Bay Jewish community.

Her work blends philological approaches to the Bible with theoretical approaches to historiography, cultural memory, and literary culture. Her first book, Forgetting to Remember: Cultural Memory, Intertextuality, and Scribal Agency in the Hebrew Bible, theorizes the formation of biblical texts as a process of cultural memory. Her research has also been published in journals such as Biblical Interpretation and Vetus Testamentum, and she has contributed public scholarship to forums such as SBL’s Bible Odyssey and Religion Dispatches.

Kemp’s current book project focuses on the relationship between memory and futurity in relation to the mass annihilation (ḥērem) traditions in the book of Joshua. Namely, she is investigating how perceptions of incompletion and failure work to propel memories forward in time and to consider why these memories can shift in import from activation of the past toward management of the future. Some of the preliminary research has already been published in the article, “From Annihilation to Dispossession: Transforming Memories of חרם in the Book of Joshua.”