Outstanding Academic Advisor - Jed Wyrick

Jed Wyrick is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at California State University, Chico, as well as Coordinator of the Humanities Program and Modern Jewish and Israel Studies. He received a BA in Classics from Brandeis University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University.

Jed serves as the principal advisor for all the Humanities majors and for students in the minors in Classical Civilization, Medieval Studies, Renaissance Studies, Cinema Studies, Humanities, and Modern Jewish and Israel Studies. He also works closely with students in the Religious Studies major and minor. Jed advises the Humanities Student Association and helps in the activities and events sponsored by the Religious Studies Student Society. Outside of academic advising, Jed works with Jewish organizations at Chico, including the Chabad Student Association and Chico Hillel. He is also the faculty and chapter advisor for the Chico chapter of Phi Delta Theta, a Greek-letter social organization. Jed led the London Semester in 2003 and is a strong advocate for study abroad.

In addition to his love of helping students reach their academic goals, Jed teaches ancient Greek language every year to a growing number of dedicated students. He is also highly involved university service. Jed was a member of the Academic Senate for 9 years and was chair of its Faculty and Student Policies committee. He has helped lead the University Chairs’ Committee as a member of its Executive Committee since 2008 and is currently a member of the Executive Management Evaluation and Development Committee. He served on the Greek life Task Force in 2005-2006 and the Greek Life Five-Year Review Committee in 2010-2011. Jed’s advising work has been aided by his deep involvement in these service roles.

Jed’s research interests include Second Temple Jewish literature, ancient and modern conceptions of authorship, Greek poetics and the history of ancient scholarship, and early biblical interpretation. His published work investigates Greco-Judaean literature, biblical apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, Hellenistic scholia, classical Jewish midrash, and modern Yiddish literature. His book, The Ascension of Authorship: Attribution and Canon Formation in Hellenistic, Jewish, and Christian Traditions (Harvard University Press, 2005), examines contrasting Greek, Jewish, and Christian views on the role of individuals in textual creation, with detailed analyses of legends about the textualization of Homeric epic and the Bible. He is currently completing a second book on the fragments of Artapanus, an ancient Jewish writer from Ptolemaic Egypt who composed biographies of the biblical patriarchs.