Yitzhak Hen

Yitzhak Hen was born in 1963

Yitzhak Hen was born in 1963. He studied history and psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, finishing his BA in 1988 and an MA in history in 1991. He completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 1994, with a thesis on popular culture in Merovingian Gaul.

After his doctorate he held postdoctoral fellowships from the Wolfson Foundation and from Yad Hanadiv. He was a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in 2000-2001, a visitor at Clare Hall in Cambridge in 2007-2008, and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2012-2013.

He taught at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where he held the Anna and Sam Lopin Chair in History. In 2018 he became head of the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University. His research covers the social, religious and cultural history of the barbarian kingdoms, early Christian liturgy in the Latin West, and Latin paleography.

He became a Life Member of Clare Hall in 2008. In 2020 he was elected a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, and in 2022 a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He has served as chief editor of a book series on cultural encounters in late antiquity and the Middle Ages.