ANINAN is a collaborative project involving a cross-disciplinary group of specialists trained in the fields of Hebrew Bible studies, early Jewish studies, early Christian studies, study of religion, classics, and comparative literature.
Elisa Uusimäki, the PI of the project, works on the literary and cultural history of Judaism in antiquity. Her areas of expertise include wisdom and ethics, lived ancient religion, travel and cultural interaction, gender and intersectionality, early biblical interpretation, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Hellenistic Judaism. In the context of ANINAN, Uusimäki worked on several aspects of spatial movement in the ancient world, including travel as both a literary motif and a social practice. Most importantly, this research resulted in a pioneering monograph on female travellers in the ancient Jewish tradition, from the Bible to Bar Kokhba.
Anat Shapiro, a PhD candidate from Tel Aviv, joined the project in September 2021. She succesfully defended her original doctoral thesis on the freedom of movement in the book of Jonah in April 2025 and works now as a part-time lecturer at Aarhus University. Her book is under contract with de Gruyter.
Four postdoctoral researchers in total were affiliated with ANINAN. This research resulted in a series of novel articles. In 2022, Lasse Løvlund Toft and Miriam DeCock conducted short periods of research on the reception history of biblical travel narratives before acquiring academic positions at the University of Oslo and Dublin City University, respectively. Eelco Glas and Rivkah Gillian Glass joined ANINAN from January 2023 to January 2026. Glas worked on Jewish migrant authors (such as Josephus, Philo and Paul) in the Greco-Roman world and now continues his research at Radboud University. Glass's research explored conceptions of travel and the symbolic potential of travel motifs in Hellenistic Jewish novels and related literature from the ancient Mediterranean, and she is about to begin a new job at the University of Bergen.
In addition to the core team, Rosanne Liebermann, a specialist in forced migrations in the ancient Near East, is an associate member of ANINAN.
