Dr. Richard A. Freund. who holds an MA, PhD, and rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary, was recently appointed the inaugural holder of the Bertram and Gladys Aaron Endowed Professorship in Jewish Studies at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. For 20 years prior to this appointment, Dr. Freund was the Maurice Greenberg Professor of Jewish History and Director of the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford. Dr. Freund has directed six archaeological projects in Israel and three projects in Europe on behalf of the University of Hartford including Bethsaida, Qumran, the Cave of Letters, Nazareth, Yavne, Har Karkom (Mount Sinai) as well as archaeological projects in Burgos and Cadiz, Spain and a research project at the extermination camp at Sobibor, Poland. In his 20 years at University of Hartford, he led a total of 30 different expeditions to Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, the UK, Argentina, Greece, Peru, Mexico, Spain, Israel, Poland, and Lithuania. 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. Dr. Freund is perhaps best known for leading an international group of archaeologists, scientists, and historians as they searched for the lost city of Atlantis, an expedition captured by the National Geographic Channel’s documentary “Atlantis Rising.” Freund’s team discovered six stone anchors in southern Spain that could date back to the Bronze Age. 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. Most recently, Dr. Freund and a group of researchers and students located the exact burial site of Matilda Olkin, who, along with her family and several neighbors, was executed by Nazi collaborators. A poet, Olkin is often referred to as the “Anne Frank of Lithuania.” Dr. Freund is the author of six books on archaeology, two books on Jewish ethics, over 100 scholarly articles and has appeared in 15 TV documentaries. Dr. Freund’s most recent book Digging through History was published by Rowman & Littlefield, 2012.