Ross Brann, a native of San Francisco, studied at the University of California, Berkeley, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, New York University, and the American University in Cairo. He has taught at Cornell since 1986 and served four terms as Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies. Professor Brann is the author of The Compunctious Poet: Cultural Ambiguity and Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991) and Power in the Portrayal: Representations of Muslims and Jews in Islamic Spain (Princeton University Press, 2002). He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania.

Brann is also the editor of three volumes and author of many essays on the intersection of medieval Jewish and Islamic culture. He is currently working on Andalusi Moorings: Al-Andalus and Sefarad as Tropes of Muslim and Jewish Culture. In 1996, he received the Stephen and Margery Russell Award for Distinguished Teaching from the College of Arts and Sciences. Brann was among the faculty, senior administrative staff, and students who conceived and developed the West Campus House System beginning in 1996. He has served as Alice Cook House Professor and Dean since the House opened in 2004.

Joining Professor Brann in 101 Alice Cook House is his wife Eileen Yagoda, a creative arts therapist who works with young children and their parents at Family and Children's Service of Ithaca. Their two sons live in New York City.

Ross Brann
Alice Cook House Professor and Dean
Milton R. Konvitz Professor of Judeo-Islamic studies
Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow
105 Alice Cook House
255-9153