Rate My Professor Gantt Gurley

Gantt Gurley is Associate Professor in the Department of German and Scandinavian at the University of Oregon, where he has served since 2009, advancing from Visiting Assistant Professor to Assistant Professor in 2011 and Associate Professor in 2017. He is also Faculty Fellow in the Clark Honors College since 2022 and affiliated with the Folklore Program, Judaic Studies Program, Medieval Studies, and Schnitzer School of Global Studies and Languages. Gurley earned his B.A. in Economics from Bard College in 1994, M.A. in Scandinavian from the University of California, Berkeley in 2002, and Ph.D. in Scandinavian from Berkeley in 2007. Prior to joining the University of Oregon, he lectured in Scandinavian at UC Berkeley from 2007 to 2008 and held the Harry Starr Fellowship in Judaica at Harvard University's Center for Jewish Studies from 2008 to 2009. His career includes guest scholarship at the University of Copenhagen's Georg Brandes Skolen from 2004 to 2005. Gurley has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Oregon Humanities Center Faculty Research Fellowship in 2012, CAS New Junior Faculty Award in 2011, Chancellor’s Dissertation Fellowship from UC Berkeley in 2006–2007, and CHC Faculty Fellowships for 2022–2025 and 2025–2028.

Gurley's research specializations encompass ancient and medieval song culture, Indo-Iranian philology, historical linguistics, minority Jewish communities, the birth of the Jewish novel, history of antisemitism, Jewish narrative and legend, 19th-century literature, the Wandering Jew, comparative mythology, Long Romanticism, Old Norse literature, Hans Christian Andersen, Franz Kafka, and religiosity in the Danish Golden Age. His first monograph, Meïr Aaron Goldschmidt and the Poetics of Jewish Fiction (Syracuse University Press, 2016), examines the Danish-Jewish writer's innovations in secular Jewish poetics. Key peer-reviewed articles include “How the Golem Came to Prague” with Edan Dekel (Jewish Quarterly Review, 2013), “Kafka’s Golem” with Edan Dekel (Jewish Quarterly Review, 2017), and “The Golem, the Ghost, and the Rose” with Edan Dekel (Jewish Quarterly Review, 2025). He has delivered public lectures such as “The Jewish Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century Novel” at Williams College in 2014 and presentations at annual meetings of the Association for Jewish Studies and Society for Advancement of Scandinavian Studies. Gurley contributes to Literature through his work on Scandinavian and Jewish literary traditions.