Donna Shalev

Who is Donna Shalev?

Donna Shalev is an American Israeli philologist and linguist. Currently, she's a senior lecturer at the Classics Department of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she teaches Greek and Latin languages and literature, and conducts research on transfer of Greek culture and texts into Arabic language and Islamic culture; Greek and Arabic medical literature as belles lettres; translation technique of the physician Hunayn ibn Ishaq; Plato and Greek dialogue literature; and Adab literature and its dialogal elements, as well as composition and embedding of belles-lettristic sources, in particular derived from Greek culture, in technical texts such as the 10th-century Rasa'il Ikhwan al-Safa, and philosophical texts such as ps.ibn-sina's 'qissat salaman wa-absal'.

Shalev has studied text as an illuminating factor, one which could shed much light on cross-cultural interests beyond the limits of language alone. As part of her extensive studies, she has also addressed the nature of "paraphrase and quotation", especially in a variety of Latin and Greek sources.