Dean, Faculty of Humanities

Prof. Efraim Lev is a full professor at the Department of Israel Studies, and Dean of Humanities at the University of Haifa. For 8 years he was Head of the Department of Humanities and Arts at the Technion, Haifa. Prof. Lev served for 5 years as head of department of Special BA Program, Faculty of Humanities at the University of Haifa before his Technion appointment.

Prof. Lev was trained both as a historian and as a field biologist and therefore his academic work has always had a strong interdisciplinary focus. He spent his post-doctoral year at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London (2000-2001), and was Visiting Scholar at St. John’s College, Cambridge (2003-2004, 2011-2012). His research focus is on ethno-pharmacology and the history of medicine and pharmacology in the medieval Middle East with particular emphasis on the medical documents in the Cairo Genizah. In his current project, “Medicine of the Genizah People”, he created a carefully planned framework of research teams, that reconstructed the medieval inventory of the practical materia medica of the Genizah community; and studied and published for example its original and practical prescriptions and medical notebooks.  Prof. Lev published 10 books (the last one is: Jewish Medical Practitioners in the Medieval Muslim World – 2021) and more than 90 referred articles and 10 chapters. At 2013 he won the George Urdang Medal for pharmaco-historical writings (Award of the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy) and at 2017 he received a Medal and life membership of the International Academy of the History of Pharmacy (Warsaw).

Education
Prof. Lev began his studies at Bar-Ilan University in the Department of Land of Israel Studies and the Department of Life Sciences, and in 1987 he graduated with a bachelor’s degree. He later completed advanced degrees at Bar-Ilan (M.Sc. in Biology and a PhD in Land of Israel studies). He completed his postdoctoral fellowship at the Wellcome Trust Center for the History of Medicine at University College London, under the guidance of Prof. Roy Porter.

Specialization
Lev specializes in the history of Arabic medicine and pharmacology in the Middle East, in particular from the Middle Ages and the early modern period.