Professor Konrad Schmid

Before coming to Zurich in 2002, Konrad Schmid was Professor of Hebrew Bible at Heidelberg University, Germany (1999-2002). He served as Member in Residence at the Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton (2006–2007) and was a Fellow of the Israel Institute of Advanced Studies in Jerusalem (2012–2013), co-directing a research group on Convergence and Divergence in Pentateuchal Theory: Bridging the Academic Cultures in Israel, North America, and Europe (www.pentateuch.uzh.ch). In 2017, he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. During the academic year 2020-2021, he was a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg at Berlin (www.wiko-berlin.de). From 2017-2024, he served as president of the «Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft für Theologie» (Academic Society for Theology; www.wgth.de) and from 2017-2025 as member of the National Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation. In 2018 he was awarded a Humboldt Research Prize, and in 2019 an ERC Advanced Grant (www.divlaw.uzh.ch) on the topic “How God Became a Lawgiver: The Place of the Torah in Ancient Near Eastern Legal History”. From 2019-2022, he served as the 24th president of the International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament (IOSOT). In 2022, he was the Lady Davis Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focuses on the Pentateuch and its legal traditions, the books of Isaiah and Jeremiah, and more generally on the literary and intellectual history of the Hebrew Bible in its ancient Near Eastern contexts.