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2012 – 2013 Fellows

Photos by D.C.Goings

Maya Barzilai University of Michigan

Maya Barzilai is an assistant professor of

Modern Hebrew and Jewish Culture in the Near

Eastern Studies Department and the Frankel

Center for Judaic Studies. She received her

Ph.D. in 2009 from the University of California, Berkeley, and researches Hebrew, German, and Yiddish multilingualism and translation; early photography and film theory; and the aesthetics and ethics of post-war literature and film.

She has published essays on German and

Israeli authors such as W. G. Sebald, Ingeborg

Bachmann, and Ronit Matalon (forthcoming).

Her book manuscript, The Golem and the Genesis of Modern Media, explores the centrality of the golem legend in narratives concerning the form

and formation of modern media such as film, comics, and computers.

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Page  56 Jonathan Freedman University of Michigan

Jonathan Freedman was recently named the Marvin Felheim Collegiate Professor of English, American Studies, and Jewish Studies at the University of Michigan. He has also taught at Yale University, Oxford University, Williams College and the Bread Loaf School of English and was recently a Fulbright fellow at Tel Aviv University. He’s the author of three books —

Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aesthet

icism and Commodity Culture (1991); The Temple of Culture: Assimilation, Anti-Semitism and the

Making of Literary Anglo-America (2001); and

Klezmer America (2008).

Lois Dubin Smith College

Lois Dubin is professor of Religion and a past

Director of the Jewish Studies Program at

Smith College, where she teaches courses in

Jewish history and thought; world religions; and women, feminism and spirituality. She has published widely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European Jewish history and thought, particularly on the cultural and political movements of Enlightenment and

Emancipation, the emergence of civil marriage and divorce, and relations between commerce, culture and politics in mercantile communities.

Her book, The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste: Absolutist Politics and Enlightenment Culture (1999), was recently reissued in paperback and also translated into Italian. For the journal Jewish

History, she edited a special issue on “Port Jews of the Atlantic” (2006) and is currently editing an issue on the scholarly legacy of the historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi.

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Page  57 Jennifer Glaser University of Cincinnati

Jennifer Glaser is an assistant professor of English and an affiliate faculty member in Judaic studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies at the University of Cincinnati. She is completing a manuscript titled Exceptional Differences: Race, Chosenness, and the Postwar Jewish American Literary Imagination. She has published and has publications forthcoming in a number of venues, including

PMLA, MELUS, Prooftexts, Literature Compass, Safundi, the American Jewish Archives Journal (AJAJ); a book of essays about Philip Roth from Continuum; and an anthology of essays from Random House. She completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania in 2008.

Harvey E. Goldberg Hebrew University

Harvey E. Goldberg taught at the University of Iowa after completing his doctoral research based on anthropological fieldwork among Jews from Libya in Israel. In 1972, he moved to Israel and the Hebrew University until retirement. He has spent time on research and teaching in Cambridge, Paris, and Istanbul. Goldberg’s approach to historical anthropology has promoted the linkage between anthropological research and Jewish Studies. Among his books are Jewish Life in Muslim Libya: Rivals and Relatives (1990) and Jewish Passages: Cycles of Jewish Life (2003).

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Page  58 Kathryn Lavezzo University of Iowa

Kathryn Lavezzo teaches English at the University of Iowa. She is the editor of Imagining a Medieval English Nation (2003) and the author of Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community, 1000–1534 (2006). With Susie Phillips, she edited New Work on the Middle Ages (PQ 87.1-2; 2008), and with Roze Hentschell, she edited Essays in Memory of Richard Helgerson: Laureations (2013). Her recent essays include “The Minster and the Privy: Rereading the Prioress’s Tale,” PMLA 126 (2011) and “Shifting Geographies of Antisemitism in Thomas of Monmouth’s Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich,” in Mapping Medieval Geographies (forthcoming).

Jessica Marglin Princeton University

Jessica Marglin is an assistant professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. Marglin’s research focuses on the history of Jewish-Muslim relations in North Africa and the Mediterranean during the early-modern and modern periods. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Her publications include articles in the Jewish Quarterly Review, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and in edited volumes. She has received grants and fellowships, including a Wexner Graduate fellowship, a Fulbright, and a Whiting dissertation completion fellowship.

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Page  59 Tatjana Lichtenstein University of Texas – Austin

Tatjana Lichtenstein is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She holds degrees from the University of Toronto, Brandeis University, and the University of Copenhagen. Since 2009, she has been teaching courses on modern Jewish and East European history at UT, including a study abroad program entitled “Uncovering Jewish Prague, Past and Present.”

Isaac Oliver Bradley University

Isaac W. Oliver earned his Ph.D. in 2012 from the University of Michigan, specializing in Second Temple Judaism and early Christian Origins. His dissertation is titled “Torah Praxis after 70 C.E.: Reading Matthew and Luke-Acts as Jewish Texts.” Oliver has written articles on ancient Judaism and early Christianity for the journals Henoch, New Testament Studies, and the Journal of Ancient Judaism. In January 2013, he began working as an assistant professor in Religious Studies at Bradley University, Illinois.

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Page  60 Ranen Omer-Sherman University of Miami

Ranen Omer-Sherman is professor of English and Jewish Studies at the University of Miami. His essays on Israeli and Jewish writers have appeared in the Journal of Jewish Identities, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Journal of Modern Literature, MELUS, Michigan Quarterly Review, Modernism/Modernity, Prooftexts, among others. His books include Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American Literature: Lazarus, Syrkin, Reznikoff, Roth; Israel in Exile: Jewish Writing and the Desert; and two co-edited volumes, The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches and Narratives of Dissent: War in Contemporary Israeli Arts and Culture (forthcoming).

Laurence Roth Susquehanna University

Laurence Roth is professor of English and Jewish Studies at Susquehanna University, where he founded and directs the Jewish Studies Program and the Publishing and Editing minor. He is the author of Inspecting Jews: American Jewish Detective Stories and numerous essays on American Jewish popular literature (especially comic books), as well as essays on Jewish bookselling and on scholarly publishing. He is also editor of Modern Language Studies and is currently co-editing, with Nadia Valman,

The Routledge Handbook to Contemporary Jewish Cultures.

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Page  61 Andrea Siegel Pepperdine University

Andrea Siegel completed her doctorate at Columbia University’s Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Cultures in 2011. Her dissertation was titled “Women, Violence, and the ‘Arab Question’ in Early Zionist Literature.” She has taught at SUNY Purchase College and Pepperdine University, where she directed an undergraduate service-learning project in partnership with an organization for the Arab blind in Nazareth. Past fellowships include a Wexner Foundation Graduate Fellowship in Jewish Studies, and the 2008-2009 Ralph I. Goldman Fellowship in International Jewish Communal Service at the American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC).

Lisa Silverman University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

Lisa Silverman is associate professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture between the World Wars (2012) and co-editor of Interwar Vienna: Culture between Tradition and Modernity (2009). She has published articles in the journals Prooftexts, Austrian Studies, the German Quarterly, and the Journal of Modern Jewish History. A specialist in modern European Jewish history, her teaching and research interests include German and Austrian Jewish culture, photography, and gender history. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 2004.

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Page  62 Orian Zakai University of Michigan

Orian Zakai received her Ph.D. from the department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation was titled “The Women’s Project: Readings in Women’s Unrequited Love of Zion.” Her research and teaching interests include women and gender in Modern and Classical Hebrew literature; the interrelations between Hebrew literature and nationalism; intersections of gender, nationality and ethnicity in contemporary Israeli culture; and post-colonial and feminist theories. Zakai has published articles on Hebrew women’s writing in Nashim and in the anthology Creoles, Diasporas, Cosmopolitanisms. Her collection of short fiction, Hashlem et he-haser (Fill in the Blanks), was published in 2010 by Keter Books.