Adam DeSchriver

Adam DeSchriver is a PhD student in the departments of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (Classical Near East) and Religious Studies (Islamic Studies). A historian and philologist of the late ancient and medieval Middle East, he focuses on the soothsayers (kuhhān) of late ancient Arabia and the role of divination (kahāna) in the religious economy and intellectual landscape of the early Islamic empire. Additionally, he researches the shift to Arabic in late ancient Yemen and cross-linguistic textual parallels in medieval Middle Eastern historiography (e.g., the Khūzistān Chronicle and al-Ṭabarī’s Taʾrīkh). He reads texts in Arabic, Syriac, Greek, Geʿez (Classical Ethiopic), Hebrew, and Ancient South Arabian.

His publications include “Locating Theory in the Work of Jonathan Z. Smith (1938-2017): An Overview” (Religious Studies Review) and “The Prophet, the Quraysh, and Taḥannuth: Pre-Islamic Monotheism in the Early Narrative Sources” (in Monotheism in Medieval Islamic Thought, ed. Ahab Bdaiwi, forthcoming with Brill).

Adam holds degrees from the University of Chicago (MA, Religious Studies), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (MA, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies), the University of Rochester (BA, Religious Studies) and the Eastman School of Music (BM, Clarinet Performance). His work has been generously supported by the Fulbright Program, the MacMillan Center (Yale), Dumbarton Oaks, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, and a Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) grant.

Adam supports his graduate student peers at Yale as a fellow in the Graduate Writing Lab and as co-organizer of the NELC department’s roundtable colloquium series. Beyond academic life, Adam maintains his connection to classical music as assistant director of the Maine Chamber Music Seminar, a festival held each June for college and post-graduate classical musicians.