Research interests: Modern Hebrew; Semantics of natural language and its interfaces with syntax and pragmatics; Context dependent expressions; Language change and the revival of Hebrew; Corpus Linguistics.

Prof. Ofra Tirosh-Becker is the Bialik Professor of Hebrew language. She is a Professor in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature and in the Department of Hebrew Language at the Hebrew University. She is the Head of the Hebrew University's Center for Jewish Languages and Literatures. From 2018 through 2021 she was the Director of the Ben-Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East. She served as the Chairperson of the Department of Hebrew and as the Chairperson of the Department of Arabic Language and Literature. Prof. Tirosh-Becker is also a member of the executive committee of the Academy of the Hebrew Language in Jerusalem, and a full member of this Academy.

She is the founder and co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Jewish Languages published by Brill, a co-editor of Massorot: Studies in Language Traditions and the Jewish Languages, and the editor of the Languages and Linguistics Section of the online edition of the Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World. She was a visiting professor at Harvard University a few times.

Tirosh-Becker is a recipient of the 2011 Asaraf Prize from The Academy of the Hebrew Language, the 2013 Ben-Zvi Award for Research of Jewish Communities in the East, and the 2013 Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality in the Humanistic Disciplines (First Prize). Her two-volume book Rabbinic Excerpts in Medieval Karaite Literature was published in 2011 (Vol. 1: Philological and Linguistic Studies, Vol. 2: A Critical Annotated Scientific Edition of the Texts). Together with Prof. Lutz Edzard of Erlangen University, Germany she published the book Jewish Languages: Text Specimens, Grammatical, Lexical, and Cultural sketches (2021).

Her research focuses on the contacts between Arabic and Hebrew, including: North-African Judeo-Arabic; Judeo-Arabic translations of the Bible and of post-biblical literature; Medieval Hebrew; Hebrew in Algeria in the 19th-20th centuries; The contact between Hebrew and Arabic in the Middle Ages; Rabbinic Hebrew in Karaite writings.

Prof. Tirosh-Becker completed her B.A. at the Department of Hebrew Language and the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at the Hebrew University. Her Master's thesis is on a Judeo-Arabic translation of Psalms from Constantine, Algeria, written under the supervision of Prof. Moshe Bar-Asher. In 2000 she received her doctoral degree from the Hebrew University. Her doctoral thesis, also under the supervision of Prof. Moshe Bar-Asher, focused on rabbinic Hebrew embedded in medieval Karaite literature, which for the most part was written in Judeo-Arabic.

In 2000 she carried out her post-doctoral training at the Center for Jewish Studies of Harvard University as a Starr Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar. In 2001-2002 she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Eliezer Ben Yehuda Research Center for the History of Hebrew at the Hebrew University.