George A. Kiraz, Editor-in-Chief
George Anton Kiraz is the Director of the Institute and President of Gorgias Press. He obtained an M.St. degree in Syriac Studies from the University of Oxford (1991) and a Ph.D. in computational linguistics from the University of Cambridge (1996) and wrote his dissertation on the morphology of Semitic languages (Computational Nonlinear Morphology (Cambridge University Press, 2001)). After a career in Bell Labs (1996–2000) and Nuance (2000–2001) in natural language processing and speech technology, he co-founded Gorgias Press in 2001.
Kiraz envisaged SEDRA as a linguistic and literary tool back in 1988. He used it for concordance generation and made it available online as open source in 1994.
Kiraz published in the fields of Syriac studies and computational linguistics. His recent publications include The Syriac Dot: A Short History (2015), Tūrāṣ Mamllā: A Grammar of the Syriac Language, Volume I: Syriac Orthography (2012), and The New Syriac Primer (2007).
James W. Bennett, Information Technology (IT) Manager
Jim Bennett entered the Air Force upon graduating from high school and spent 11 years officially as a missile technician and software engineer helping to validate Ada compilers for embedded systems. After being medically discharged, he started his own company and worked as a contracting software engineer for most of the last 26 years.
In 2001 he took a sabbatical from work and pursued a dual Bachelor's degree in Near Eastern Antiquities and Religious Studies from Missouri State University.
After completing his BA he pursued a Master of Arts in Religious Studies with a focus on Syriac Christianity. While working on his thesis "Jesus the Slayer of Death: The Decensus ad Inferos in the Demonstrations of Aphrahat" he built a database of the Demonstrations from data he obtained from CAL and wrote several programs to assist in analyzing the texts. During the course of his MA he spent six weeks in Aleppo studying Syriac under Abrohom Nuro.
Resource Partners
- The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon Project, Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, Ohio
- Digital South Asia Library, The University of Chicago, Center for Research Libraries (Example: ܒܣܬܪܐ)
- Mawrid Reader, courtesy of Abdurahman Erik Taal (Example: ܕܘܕܓ)
- Perseus under PhiloLogic, Department of Classics, The University of Chicago (Example: ܐܐܪ)
- Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, Wiesbaden, Germany (Publishing Company) (Example: ܐܒܓܪܐ)
Resource Contributors
- American Foundation for Syriac Studies (Example: ܐܐܪ)
- Sebastian P. Brock (University of Oxford)
- Claudia A. Ciancaglini (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy)
- Dayroyo Zaytoun Saome (St. Aphrem Theological Seminar, Maarat Saydnaya, Syria)