Who We Are
Ilana Szobel is Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature on the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun
Chair in the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies Department, and Core Faculty in the
Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University. She is the
author of A Poetics of Trauma: The Work of Dahlia Ravikovitch (Brandeis University Press,
2013) and Flesh of My Flesh: Sexual Violence in Modern Hebrew Literature (SUNY Press,
2021), which was a finalist for the Concordia University Library–Azrieli Institute Award for
Best Book in Israel Studies. Her book The Un-Chosen Body: Disability Culture in Israel is
forthcoming in September 2025 with Wayne State University Press. In addition to her
academic works, Szobel has published a poetry book, Once Upon a Days (בשכבר הימים הבאים)
(Iton 77 Publishing House, 2023), and edited two of Tsvia Litevsky’s poetry collections:
Core of Stillness (עין הדומיה) (Carmel Publishing House, 2021) and Nothingness in Its Entirety
(האֵין ומלואו) (Afik Books Publishing House, 2024).
Esha Senchaudhuri is the Assistant Director of the Mandel Center for the Humanities, where she focuses her energies on the 'Humanities and Global Affairs' program launched in 2024, and the new programs in 'Law and Humanities' and 'Economics and Humanities' launched in 2025. She also leads the Mandel Community Fellowships program for graduate students, and the 'Education Policy & Social Justice' working group. Esha received her PhD in philosophy at the London School of Economics and LLM in Comparative & Foreign Law from the University of London. She also has a Law Diploma focused on economic regulation from the University of London, and was an early career policy fellow in Humanities, Arts & American Institutions at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. There she supported the National Commission on Language Learning and helped establish the National Commission on Arts. She also traveled with the Academy's Global Security team to NATO and the European Parliament to present her research on the protection of cultural heritage in war zones. This work was sponsored through an initiative of the Getty Trust. From 2024 - 2025 Esha was a Higher Education Ambassador at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Andie is a master's student in the philosophy department. She completed her BA in philosophy from Colgate University, and worked as a middle school assistant teacher at a charter school in Boston before joining Brandeis. She's passionate about the role of the humanities in education and life generally.
Steering Committee
Andie Berry is an assistant professor of Theater Arts at Brandeis University. She specializes in contemporary African American theater with a focus on women’s writing, twentieth- and twenty-first century performance cultures, and experimental drama. She is currently at work on a a book manuscript that re-examines the imaginative possibilities of the black body onstage in the United States’s post-post-civil rights era. She holds a Ph.D. in English and African American Studies from Yale University.
Yuval Evri is an assistant professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and Marash and Ocuin Chair in Ottoman, Mizrahi and Sephardic Jewish Studies at Brandeis University. He is a cultural historian who specializes in Sephardi/Arab-Jewish modern history and culture. He is particularly interested in Palestine during the first half of the 20th century. His current book project traces the invention of the Mizrahim/Sephardim as go-betweens and mediators on the borderline that emerged between the Jew and the Arab and between Hebrew and Arabic and explores how the fluidity inherent in this position became a source of resistance to the dominant national and monolingual forces. His last book, titled: The Return to Al-Andalus: Disputes Over Sephardic Culture and Identity Between Arabic and Hebrew, was published by Magnes Press in 2020. The English edition of Evri's book, titled The Return to Sepharad and the Erasure of al-Andalus, is scheduled for publication by Indiana University Press in 2026.
A.J. Murphy is a scholar of American military history, the history of capitalism, and the history of gender and sexuality. Their current book project - Pentagon Capitalism: Management Expertise and the Transformation of the Cold War U.S. Military - recounts how defense leaders reorganized the U.S. military on the model of the private, for-profit firm.
Gowri Vijayakumar is an associate professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, affiliated with the South Asian Studies Program at Brandeis. She is the author of At Risk: Indian Sexual Politics and the Global Aids Crisis, published by Stanford University Press in 2021.
Members on Sabbatical & Former Steering Committee Members
Ulka Anjaria is a professor of English and the Barbara Mandel Professor of Humanities at Brandeis University, affiliated with the South Asian Studies program. She is the author of three books, Realism in the 20-Century Indian Novel: Colonial Difference and Literary Form (2012), Reading India Now: Contemporary Formations in Literature and Popular Culture (2019), and Understanding Bollywood: The Grammar of Hindi Cinema (2021). She is also the editor of A History of the Indian Novel in English (2015) and The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures (2024) and has published on Indian and Pakistani literature and film in a variety of scholarly and public-facing venues.
Professor Targoff, the founding director of the Mandel Center for the Humanities, teaches and studies English and Italian Renaissance literature. She is the author of "Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion" (Chicago, 2001); "John Donne, Body and Soul" (Chicago, 2008); "Posthumous Love: Eros and the Afterlife in Renaissance England" (Chicago, 2014), and "Renaissance Woman: The Life of Vittoria Colonna" (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2018). Her new work focuses on English women writers in the age of Shakespeare.
Brandon Callender is an assistant professor of English at Brandeis University where he specializes in Black queer literatures and horror studies. He received his doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley in spring 2020 and is currently working on his book manuscript, "The Charge of the Other in Black Gay Men's Literatures."
Emilie Connolly is an assistant professor of early American history at Brandeis. She is a historian of the 19th-century United States with a focus on the history of political economy, colonialism and Indigenous peoples of North America. She is currently at work on a book manuscript, "Empire’s Succession: Trusteeship, Capitalism and Native Dispossession in the United States," under contract with Princeton University Press. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of the Early Republic and the American Historical Review.
Emilie Diouf is an assistant professor of English at Brandeis University. Her research explores how the complex legacies of civil war, genocide and dictatorship bear on gendered experiences of the contemporary moment and allow us to articulate idioms of trauma capable of centering the often complex socio-political, cultural, and discursive conditions through which African women’s experiences of trauma are mediated locally, regionally and globally.
María J. Durán teaches courses on Latinx literatures and cultures. Her research focuses on political agency and the performance of resistance in 20th- and 21st-century U.S. Latinx cultural productions. Her other research interests include Latinx theater, Latinx speculative fiction, and third world feminisms. Durán is currently working on her solo-authored monograph, which examines structural violence and grief in contemporary Latinx literature to illuminate manifestations of care in vulnerable Latinx communities and to theorize future visions of care work anchored in feminist scholarship.
Sarah Mayorga is an associate professor of sociology and a core faculty member in the Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx Studies program. She is a scholar of race and racism, urban sociology and Latinx migration. She is the author of "Behind the White Picket Fence: Power and Privilege in a Multiethnic Neighborhood" (UNC Press, 2014).
David Sherman, faculty in English at Brandeis University, writes and teaches about global modernism, elegy and the politics of commemoration, public sphere theory, comedy, literature in the criminal justice system, and literature and philosophy.
