Summer School
Summer School Faculty
Anne Albert/ University of Pennsylvania
Read MoreAnne Albert is the Katz Center’s Klatt Family Director for Public Programs and Managing Editor of the Jewish Quarterly Review. She earned her B.A. in the History of Religions at Reed College and her Ph.D. in History at the University of Pennsylvania. Her scholarship focuses on early modern Jewish history, especially intellectual history, Jewish-Christian relations, and politics. She is currently completing a book on the political self-conception of the Sephardi Jews of seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Dr. Albert has received fellowship support from the Mellon Foundation, the Foundation for Jewish Culture, the American Association of University Women, and the Fulbright scholars program; and she has taught at Swarthmore College, Bryn Mawr College, Brown University, and PennRead LessJulie Cooper/ Tel Aviv University
Read MoreJulie E. Cooper is Senior Lecturer (US equivalent: Associate Professor) in the Political Science Department at Tel Aviv University. Her research interests include the history of political theory; early modern political theory (especially Hobbes and Spinoza); secularism and secularization; Jewish political thought; and modern Jewish thought. She is the author of Secular Powers: Humility in Modern Political Thought (Chicago, 2013). Her work has appeared in journals including Review of Politics, The Historical Journal, Political Theory, Jewish Quarterly Review, Annual Review of Political Science, and the Journal of Politics. She has been awarded fellowships from the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study and The Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. She is currently working on a book project, tentatively entitled Politics Without Sovereignty? Exile, State, and Territory in Jewish Thought, that examines modern attempts to reimagine and rehabilitate Judaism’s national and political dimensionsRead LessNatalie Dohrmann/ University of Pennsylvania
Read MoreNatalie B. Dohrmann (B.A. Princeton University; Ph.D. University of Chicago) teaches in the departments of Religious Studies and History and in the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She is Associate Director of the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies and coeditor of the Jewish Quarterly Review. Her research is focused on the Roman cultural context of rabbinic law. She has published articles recently in Public and Private in Ancient Mediterranean Law and Religion, edited by Clifford Ando and Jörg Rüpke ; and Critical Analysis of Law. She is coeditor with Annette Reed of Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire: The Poetics of Power in Late Antiquity.Read Less
Summer School - Class of 2017
Lesley Simpson/ York University
Lesley is a former Canadian journalist who worked for Canadian daily newspapers and public broadcasting. she is now a third year PHD candidate at York University in Canada, and she interested in Jewish ethical wills, memory, and narrative.
Cecilia Haendler/ Freie Universität Berlin
Read MoreCecilia Haendler, born in 1988 in Florence, Italy, is doing a PhD on gendered metaphorical language inTannaitic literature at the Freie Universität Berlin, supported by a full scholarship from a German foundation. For
the series A Feminist Commentary on the Babylonian Talmud she is writing about Mishnah Hallah, Orlah and
Bikkurim. She has worked as a research associate in the project A Digital Synopsis of the Mishnah and Tosefta.
Read LessBinyamin Goldstein/ Yeshiva University
Binyamin Y. Goldstein is a doctoral candidate at Yeshiva University. His dissertation will focus on Jewish-Christian literary interaction in the early Abbasid period. His hobbies include everything Syriac-related, cheesemaking, and metalsmithing.
Yotam Popliker/ Ben Gurion University
I am on my fourth year as a PhD student in the Hebrew Literature Department, Ben Gurion University of the Negev. I wright my thesis on the poetry of Gabriel Preil, a modern Hebrew and Yiddish poet who leaved in the American Diaspora.
Alexander Marcus/ Stanford University
Read MoreAlexander Marcus is native New Yorker. He is pursuing a PhD in Religious Studies at Stanford University,focusing on the Babylonian Talmud in its Sasanian context. He is also an organizer for the Austria-based
Muslim Jewish Conference.
Read LessEliyahu Rosenfeld/ Ben Gurion University
Read MoreEliyahu Rosenfeld is a Ph.D. Student in the department of literature at Ben Gurion University. He wrote histhesis on the function of silence in discussions concerning virginity claims in the Babylonian Talmud. His current research deals with the poetics of Halachic Sugyot in Babylonian Talmud focusing on the role of the narrator and the intended reader.
Read LessCatherine Power/ University of Toronto
Read MoreCatherine R. Power is currently working toward a PhD in political theory within the department of political science at the University of Toronto. She received a BAH from the University of Toronto and MA in political science from McGill University. Her MA thesis, On the Problem of Ethnicity in Multicultural Theory: Patriotism and Diaspora Reconsidered explored some of the ways that we can better theorize how minorities negotiate belonging within nation-states. Her doctoral research focuses on the ways that figural “judaism” has served as a locus of critical philosophical conjecture and discussion in modern political thought. She has also previously published work examining Jewish responses to modernity and nationalism. Catherine is the recipient of numerous undergraduate and graduate awardsRead LessClaire English/ Concordia University
Read MoreClaire English is currently completing course work in the Judaic Studies stream of the PhD program. Her research examines the intersections of Disability and Judaic Studies. For her dissertation, Claire will write a history of the Jewish Deaf communities of New York in the late 19th to early 20th century. Further areas of study include Hebrew Bible and Interpretation, Rabbinics, Ritual Theory, Sensory and Material Anthropology, and the History of Emotions. Claire holds a BA in Classical Civilization and an MA in Judaic Studies, both from Concordia University.Read LessRonny Moalem/ The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Read MoreI study rabbinic literature, write and wish I read (and wrote) more prose.Read LessHannah Mayne/ University of Toronto
Read MoreHannah is a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, and in the collaborative program in Jewish Studies. Her dissertation work focuses on the politics of contemporary Jewish women’s prayer practices in Jerusalem. A current key site of her research is the ongoing public debate surrounding gender and ritual at the Western WallRead LessMili Leitner/ University of Chicago
Read MoreMili trained as a classical violinist in London before moving to the University of Chicago in 2014 to undertake PhD studies in Ethnomusicology. Her dissertation is provisionally entitled “Zionism(s), Racialization, and the Auditory Calibration of the Israeli Public Sphere”. In this research she merges ethnographic and historiographic methodologies, engaging with sound studies, racialization theory, and contemporary historiographic approaches to Zionism and Israeli cultural history. In her spare time she enjoys yoga, rock climbing, and tea drinking.Read LessNoam Lefler/ The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
I consider myself as a kind of modern pirate, even though I run a bourgeois life. I like masks. I do prefer Shabtai Svi over Rambam, and I do not like Kegel.
Apolonia Kuc/ University of Southampton
Graduate student (Jagiellonian University, Poland- University of Southampton,UK) involved in various voluntary and charity work. Academic interests focused on Jewish history and
Shai Zamir/ University of Michigan
I am a history graduate student at the University of Michigan working on late medieval and early modern Spain and the Mediterranean. My research interests include Christian-Jewish relations, Sephardi literary production, and the history of gender and sexuality.