David Torollo
Personal Docente e Investigador
After completing my doctorate at the University of Salamanca in 2014, I held positions as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the ALIENTO project at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris (2014) and as a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Shalom Spiegel Institute for Medieval Hebrew Poetry at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York (2015-2016). Between 2016-2019, I was a Lecturer in Spanish at the Cervantes Institute in Tel Aviv and Cairo. Then I joined King's College London, as a Postdoctoral Fellow (2019-2020) in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies and as Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Spanish Studies in the same department (2020-2022). Since February 2022, I am Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at the Complutense University in Madrid.
My teaching is informed by my research interests (Medieval Iberia, the medieval Mediterranean, Cultural Translation, Wisdom Literature, and sacred texts of Judaism, Islam and Christianity) and my classes function as an educational meeting point to test and develop my ideas. Pivotal to my teaching is the conviction that language is the most powerful human tool that shapes our perception and understanding of the world and that conditions our individual and collective identities. I explore and teach texts in Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Spanish.
Courses that I am currently teaching (2025/2026):
- BA in "Semitic and Islamic Studies": Modern Hebrew I; Advanced Modern Hebrew; and History of the Jewish People (16th-21th centuries)
- MA in "Medieval Studies": Arab and Jewish Traditions in Medieval Culture
- MA in "Arab and Hebrew Cultures: Al-Andalus and the Contemporary Arab World" (University of Granada): Medieval Hebrew Literature: Poems and Tales at a Crossroads of Cultures
Two of my most recent publications are:
- Sefer ha-Pardes by Jedaiah ha-Penini: A Critical Edition with English Translation (Cambridge: OpenBook Publishers, 2022).
- Mishle he-'arav y la tradición sapiencial hebrea en la Península Ibérica y Provenza, siglos XII y XIII (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2021).
For a complete list of publications, click here.