Norbert M. Samuelson

Academic biography Education Samuelson earned his bachelor's degree at Northwestern University in 1957. He then attended the Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion, where he earned his Bachelor of Hebrew Letters in 1959 and his Master of Hebrew Letters and rabbinic ordination in 1962. He received his doctorate at Indiana University Bloomington in 1970, writing his dissertation on "The Problem of God's Knowledge in Gersonides – A Translation of and Commentary to Book III of the Milhamot Adonai (The Wars of the Lord)". His dissertation advisers were Shlomo Pines of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Milton Fisk of Indiana University.

He was Hillel director at Indiana University from 1962 to 1967 and at Princeton University from 1968 to 1973.

Academic positions From 1963 to 1967, Samuelson was a teaching assistant in the philosophy department at Indiana University. He was a visiting lecturer in the philosophy department at Brooklyn College from 1969 to 1970 and a visiting associate professor in the Hebraic Studies department at Rutgers University from 1969 to 1973.

From 1973 to 1975, Samuelson was on the faculty of the University of Virginia Department of Religious Studies as an assistant professor. Beginning in 1975, he was an associate professor in the Religion Department at Temple University; in 1987 he became a full professor, and continued in this position until 1998. At that point he moved to Arizona State University, where he became the Harold and Jean Grossman Professor of Jewish Studies in the Religious Studies Department. Since retirement from ASU, he resided in Chicago.

Samuelson lectured at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and Lancaster University in England, a visiting associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania Religious Studies Department (1984), and a guest professor at the University of Hamburg, Fachbereich evangelische Theologie (Summer 1995).

He was a fellow of the Academy of Jewish Philosophy since 1979, serving as chairman from 1979 to 1988 and Secretary-Treasurer from 1988 until his retirement. ), is Director of Jewish Studies, Regents Professor of History, and Irving and Miriam Lowe Professor of Modern Judaism at Arizona State University. The Samuelsons co-founded the Judaism, Science and Medicine Group in ASU's Jewish Studies Department in 2008 and occasionally appeared in the same conference programs. In 2006, the couple summarized their joint positions on transhumanism in an article in Milestones, published by the John Templeton Foundation.

Samuelson and Tirosh divorced, after which Samuelson married Jewish historian Amy Hill Shevitz in 2013. Samuelson died in his birthplace of Chicago, Illinois on 9 May 2022, at the age of 86.