Peter Cole

Peter Cole has been newly appointed as Professor in the Practice of Jewish Studies. A poet and translator, Cole has been affiliated with Yale since 2006 and was previously a Senior Lecturer in Judaic Studies and in Comparative Literature. His research interests include translation, Hebrew and Arabic Poetry (medieval and modern), Jewish and Middle Eastern poetry through the ages, and modern American and English poetry. He is the author of five books of poems, and many volumes of translation from Hebrew and Arabic—most recently Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017). Cole has received numerous honors for his work, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, the Association of American Publishers’ Hawkins Award for Book of the Year, the PEN Translation Award for Poetry, the American Library Association’s Brody Medal for the Jewish Book of the Year, and a TLS Translation Prize. He is the recipient of a 2010 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2007 was named a MacArthur Fellow. He divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven.