Dr. Richard A. Freund is the Maurice Greenberg Professor of Jewish History and Director of the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford.
Richard has directed over a dozen archaeological projects on behalf of the University of Hartford in Israel, including sites associated with the beginnings of Christianity and Judaism at Nazareth, Bethsaida, and Qumran, site of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In addition, he has directed projects in Spain (two sites), Poland (two sites), Rhodes, Greece (four sites) and Lithuania (four sites in 2016). His work has been featured in the New York Times, Time magazine, Reader’s Digest, Newsweek, Archaeology, seen on the BBC, MSNBC, CNN, NPR and Fox News and in hundreds of media outlets worldwide. His work has been chronicled in more than a dozen television documentaries from National Geographic, CNN, Discovery, the History Channel and PBS.
His most recent work in Lithuania was chronicled in a recent NOVA science series episode: “Holocaust Escape Tunnel” on the new discoveries made in the Ponar Burial Pits and the Great Synagogue of Vilna, Lithuania.
The author of hundreds of scholarly articles and nine books (written or co-edited), Richard's most recent book Digging through History was published by Rowman & Littlefield, 2012.