Aaron Tugendhaft is the Robart Aird Chair of Humanities at Deep Springs College and the Founding Director of The Abarbanel Institute. A scholar of the ancient Middle East and a dedicated humanities teacher focusing on religion, political philosophy, and the arts, he received his PhD from the Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University in 2012 and also holds degrees in Art History and Social Thought from the University of Chicago. Before Deep Springs, Aaron taught at Bard College Berlin, New York University, and the University of Texas at Austin. He was a Harper Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago from 2014 to 2018. In 2013, he received the Jonas Greenfield Prize for Younger Semitists from the American Oriental Society. Aaron is the editor, with Josh Ellenbogen, of Idol Anxiety (Stanford 2011) and the author of Baal and the Politics of Poetry (Routledge 2018) and The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet (University of Chicago Press, 2020).