• Research
• BRANDEIS HOME

Faculty

The following full-time faculty serve as the backbone of the Israel Studies curriculum on campus, bolstered by the Hebrew language faculty and visiting professors and post-doctoral fellows hosted by the Schusterman Center.

Gannit Ankori is chair of Israeli Art in the department of Fine Arts.  Before coming to Brandeis, she served as the Henya Sharef Professor of Humanities and chair of the department of Art History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has taught and lectured about Israeli and Palestinian art for many years and has published extensively on the visual representation of gender-related issues, the construction of identity, exile, trauma, and hybridity. Her book, Palestinian Art, was published by Reaktion Books, London, in 2006 and is distributed in the US by the University of Chicago Press. She won a Polonsky Prize for Originality and Creativity in the Humanistic Disciplines for this publication. Her forthcoming English-language book, Frida Kahlo, will be published as part of the prestigious Critical Lives series by Reaktion Books in London. At Brandeis she offers two courses: The first focuses on art in Israel, and explores Israeli artists of all ethnic backgrounds, including Jewish as well as Bedouin, Druze, Muslim and Christian artists. A second course focuses on issues related to ‘Trauma and Art’ exploring  the dialogue between Israeli art and the international art world.
gannit@brandeis.edu

Yehudah Mirsky is associate professor of the practice of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis. He studied at Yeshivat Har Etzion and Yeshiva College and received rabbinic ordination in Jerusalem. He graduated from Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the law review, and completed his PhD in Religion at Harvard. He worked in Washington as an aide to then-Senators Bob Kerrey and Al Gore, and at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and served in the Clinton Administration as special advisor in the US State Department's human rights bureau. He has written widely on politics, theology and culture for a number of publications including The New Republic and The Economist, he is a Contributing Editor of the Jerusalem Report and is on the editorial board of Eretz Acheret. After the attacks of September 11 he served as a volunteer chaplain for the Red Cross. He is currently a contributing writer at Jewish Ideas Daily.com and a member of the board of Yerushalmim, the movement for a pluralist and livable Jerusalem. His biography of Rabbi Abraham Issac Kook is forthcoming from Yale University Press.

Eugene R. Sheppard is associate professor of Modern Jewish History and Thought, and associate director of the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry. He is most interested in modern German Jewish thought and the influence of European Jewish refugees on public life and academia in the United States.  His recent publications include "Leo Strauss and Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher" (2006), "The Early Leo Strauss" (co-edited with P. Bouretz, forthcoming) and "Babylon and Jerusalem: Engaging the Thought and Legacy of Simon Rawidowicz" (co-edited with D. Myers, forthcoming). Sheppard is also co-editor, with Samuel Moyn, of the Brandeis University Press/UPNE series, "Readings in Modern Jewish Thought." At Brandeis he teaches courses on Jewish nationalism and Zionist thought.
sheppard@brandeis.edu

S. Ilan Troen '63 is director of the Schusterman Center and is the Stoll Family Chair in Israel Studies. Before joining Brandeis, he served as director of the Ben-Gurion Research Institute and Archives in Sede Boker, Israel, and dean of the faculty of humanities and social sciences at Ben-Gurion University. He has authored or edited 11 books in American, Jewish and Israeli history. He is also the founding editor of Israel Studies (Indiana University Press), an international journal that publishes three issues annually on behalf of Brandeis and Ben-Gurion University. His book publications include Jewish Centers and Peripheries: European Jewry Between America and Israel 50 Years after World War II (1998); The Americanization of Israel (2001), with Glenda Abramson; Divergent Jewish Cultures: Israel and America (2001), with Deborah Dash-Moore; Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement (2003); with Jacob Lassner, Jews and Muslims in the Arab World; Haunted by Pasts Real and Imagined (2007); and, with Maoz Azaryahu (eds.), Tel Aviv, The First Century: Visions, Designs, Actualities (2012).
troen@brandeis.edu

ASSOCIATED FACULTY

Shai Feldman is the Judith and Sidney Swartz Director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. He is also an associate fellow of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London and a member of the Board of Director's of Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Before joining the Crown Center, Feldman served from 1997 to 2005 as head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, and from 2001 to 2003, as a member of the UN Secretary General's Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters. Author of numerous publications, Feldman has written five books on the topic of Israeli security and peacemaking, including:  Israeli Nuclear Deterrence: A Strategy for the 1980s (1982); The Future of U.S.-Israel Strategic Cooperation (1996); Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control in the Middle East (1997); Bridging the Gap – A Future Security Architecture for the Middle East (1997) with Abdullah Toukan;  and, Track-II Diplomacy – Lessons from the Middle East (2003) with Hussein Agha, Ahmad Khalidi, and Zeev Schiff.

Kanan Makiya is the Sylvia K. Hassenfeld Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University. Baghdad-born Makiya wrote Republic of Fear, which became a bestseller after Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991. Prior to his appointment at Brandeis, he was engaged with the US government and Iraqi opposition in developing a detailed roadmap for the democratization of Iraq after the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime.

Jonathan Sarna is  the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University and Director of its Hornstein Jewish Professional Leadership Program. Dubbed by the Forward newspaper in 2004 as one of America’s fifty most influential American Jews, he was Chief Historian for the 350th commemoration of the American Jewish community, and is recognized as a leading commentator on American Jewish history, religion and life. Dr. Sarna has written, edited, or co-edited more than twenty books, including the new "A Time to Every Purpose: Letters to a Young Jew."  He is best known for the acclaimed "American Judaism: A History."  Winner of the Jewish Book Council’s “Jewish Book of the Year Award” in 2004, it has been praised as being “the single best description of American Judaism during its 350 years on American soil.”

Naghmeh Sohrabi is Lecturer in History and associate director for Research at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies. Sohrabi was a postdoctoral fellow at the Crown Center from 2005-2007. She received her Ph.D. in history and Middle East studies from Harvard University in 2005. Her dissertation received an honorable mention from the Foundation for Iranian Studies. Sohrabi is currently under contract with Oxford University Press to publish her book on 19th century Persian travelers to Europe. She has taught courses at Harvard University, Skidmore College, and most recently at Brandeis.