Jodi Magness
Jodi Magness (born September 19, 1956) is an archaeologist, orientalist and scholar of religion. She serves as the Kenan Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence in Early Judaism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She previously taught at Tufts University. Early life and education Magness received her B.A. in Archaeology and History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1977), and her Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology from the University of Pennsylvania (1989). Academic career From 1990 to 1992, Magness was Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Syro-Palestinian Archaeology at the Center for Old World Archaeology and Art at Brown University. She also taught at Tufts University before joining the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she is Kenan Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence in Early Judaism. Magness has participated in 20 different excavations in Israel and Greece. She co-directed the 1995 excavations of the Roman siege works at Masada. From 1997 to 1999 she co-directed excavations at Khirbet Yattir in Israel. Since 2003 Professor Magness has been the co-director of the excavations in the late Roman fort at Yotvata, Israel. In 2011 she began to dig at Huqoq. Magness is a popular professor whose "unique teaching style of using