Jewish Studies Colloquia
The Jewish Studies Colloquium, which has been meeting since 2001, provides a forum for graduate students and faculty from Brandeis University and other academic institutions around the world to discuss their current research and works-in-progress. The colloquium engages a wide range of topics in Jewish studies from history and thought to political and national identity.
MA and PhD candidates, college and university faculty, and independent scholars are welcome.
2025-2026 Schedule
Fall 2025
Colloquia are hosted in person in Lown 315 at Brandeis and stream live on Zoom. Registration is required for Zoom!
September 9, 2025
Trevor Wilson, UNC Chapel Hill
- "Through the Sufi Curtain: Bahya ibn Paquda's Duties of the Heart and the Islamic Zuhd Tradition"
October 21, 2025
Ehud Krinis, Ben Gurion University of the Negev
- "Grandchildren of Survivors, Grandchildren of Perpetrators, and Holocaust Memory"
November 18, 2025
Tamar Aizenberg, Brandeis University
- "Can a Jew Love? Christians, Emotions, and Jewish History"
December 9, 2025
Jonathan Elukin, Trinity College
Spring 2026
January 20, 2026
Thomas Burman, University of Notre Dame
February 24, 2026
Alex Szabo, Brandeis University
March 24, 2026
Tamar Hess, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
April 14, 2026
Sari Siegel, Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University
Past Colloquia
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- "Nationalism and Its Discontents: Jewish Visions of Pluralism in Central Europe, 1850s-1930s"
September 17, 2024
Till van Rahden, Université de Montréal
- "Physicians, The Diffusion of Medical Knowledge, and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe"
October 15, 2024
Andrew Berns, University of South Carolina
- "Confession Booths, Human Zoos, and Adolf Eichmann: Presenting Jews in Berlin"
November 12, 2024
Yaniv Feller, University of Florida
- "Haunted and Hallowed Grounds: Confronting the German Past in the First Person"
December 10, 2024
Rebecca Wittmann, University of Toronto
- "Haredi/Ultra-Orthodox Writings: Definitions, History, and Canon"
January 28, 2025
Naomi Seidman, University of Toronto & Joshua Shanes, College of Charleston
- "Yiddish Art: The Formal and Social Functions of Marginality"
March 18, 2025
Noa Tsaushu, Columbia University
- "Andalusi Scholar-Officials in the Late Medieval Mediterranean World"
April 22, 2025
Mohamad Ballan, Stony Brook University
- "The Bible in Baghdad: A Medieval Karaite Interprets Genesis"
September 12, 2023
Miriam Goldstein, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
- "Interdisciplinary Exploration of Post-Holocaust History through Digital Tools: Opportunities and Limitations"
October 24, 2023
Ildikó Barna, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest
- "Between the Public and the Communal: Depictions of Sabbatian Spaces in the Late Ottoman Era"
November 14, 2023
Hadar Feldman Samet, Tel Aviv University
- "Mendicant Jewish Converts and Miracles Stories in the Medieval Pyrenees"
December 5, 2023
Paola Tartakoff, Rutgers University
- "Introducing Modern Jewish Ethics, 1970-Present"
January 23, 2024
Jonathan Crane, Emory University; Emily Filler, Washington and Lee University; Mira Wasserman, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College
- "That Other Fornication: Race and Judaism in Foucault's Concept of Critique"
February 27, 2024
Kirsten Collins, University of Chicago Divinity School
- "Valeriu Marcu: Dialectics, Power, and the Writing of History"
March 12, 2024
Eugene Sheppard, Brandeis University
- "Writing American Jewish History: An Irish Project"
April 16, 2024
Hasia Diner, New York University
- "Pedagogy, Language, and Labor Politics in Kafka's Hebrew Notebooks"
September 13, 2022
Na'ama Rokem, University of Chicago
- "Ifra Hormiz: Talmudic Stories of the Persian Queen Mother and the Bavli's Redaction"
October 25, 2022
Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, Ben-Gurion University
- "A Jewish Bill of Indictment: The New York Black Book of 1946"
November 8, 2022
Elisabeth Gallas, Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture-Simon Dubnow
- "The Precedents and Origin of Djerba's Or Torah Fund"
January 24, 2023
Joshua Picard, Princeton University
- "Do Citizens Need to be Philosophers? Nachman Krochmal’s Diasporic Jewish Politics"
February 14, 2023
Elias Sacks, Jewish Publication Society
- "Registers of Belonging, Registers of Difference: Early Modern Jewish Midwives and their Records"
March 14, 2023
Jordan Katz, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
- "Making and Unmaking Literature in Nazi Ghettos in Poland"
April 25, 2023
Sven-Erik Rose, University of California, Davis
- "Métis, Jews, and the Politics of Counting Difference in Canada"
September 14, 2021
David Koffman, York University
- "Two Steps from the Abyss: An Ottoman Jewish Witness to War"
October 12, 2021
Devi Mays, University of Michigan
- "Babyn Yar 80 Years Later: New Findings, Areas of Dispute, and Remaining Questions"
November 16, 2021
Martin Dean, Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center
- "Soul Food and Salvation in Medieval Ashkenaz: the Ambrosian Bible's 'Heavenly Banquet' Revisited"
January 18, 2022
David Shyovitz, Northwestern University
- "From the 'Wretched' to the 'Bourgeoisie': Jews in Modern Iran"
February 15, 2022
Daniella Farah, Rice University
- "Hermann Cohen's Virtue Ethics: Power and Agency within the Experience of Marginalization"
March 15, 2022
Shira Billet, Yale University
- "How to Draw German-Jewish History? The Graphic History Project 'Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts its Nazi Past'"
April 12, 2022
Kim Wünschmann, Institute for the History of the German Jews, Hamburg
- "From the Left and the Right: Campus Antisemitism and American Jewish Life"
September 22, 2020
Marc Dollinger, San Francisco State University
- "God's Disability: Confronting the 'Euthanasia' Murders"
October 27, 2020
Dagmar Herzog, the Graduate Center at CUNY
- "Riddling Materiality: the Queen of Sheba, Solomon, and Riddles in Ninth-Century Tradition"
November 17, 2020
Jillian Stinchcomb, Brandeis University
- "Jerusalem's Ancient Queens: Gender, Power, and Erasure"
February 23, 2021
Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Fordham University
- "The Global Merchants: the World of the Sassoons"
March 23, 2021
Joseph Sassoon, Georgetown University
- "'Sit and Study This Book with Your Family': Print Culture in 19th-Century North Africa"
April 20, 2021
Noam Sienna, University of Minnesota
- "The 'Question of the Pogroms' in a Paris Courtroom in the 1920s: the Trial of Sholem Schwartzbard"
September 17, 2019
Alexandra Garbarini, Williams College
- "Mobility: Jewish Migration from Lithuania Before 1880"
November 19, 2019
Tobias Brinkmann, Penn State University
- "Envisioning a Jewish Monastic Community: Zalman Schachter, Catholicism, and the B'nai Or Fellowship"
December 10, 2019
Or Rose, Hebrew College
- "The Trouble with Medieval Conversion: Christendom and Christian Anxiety about Jewish Conversion"
January 21, 2020
Nina Caputo, University of Florida
- "The Return of the Corporation: Recent Israeli Conversion Cases and American Debates about Religious Freedom"
February 25, 2020
Leora Batnitzky, Princeton University
- "'A mouth as round as a signet- ring'; A Gendered Reading of Jewelry in the Medieval Islamicate Society and Culture"
March 17, 2020 (Canceled)
Miriam Frenkel, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
- "God's Disability: Confronting the 'Euthanasia' Murders"
April 21, 2020 (Canceled)
Dagmar Herzog, the Graduate Center - CUNY
- "Wittgenstein's Moses: Reference, Identity and an Embarrassing Confession"
October 9, 2018
Abraham Socher, Jewish Review of Books
- "The Outsider: Benzion Netenyahu and the Politics of Resentment"
November 6, 2018
Adi Armon, University of Wisconsin - Madison
- "Rabbinic Narratives and the Problem of Non-Compliance in the Babylonian Talmud"
December 4, 2018
Lynn Kaye, Brandeis University
- "A Crip Zionism? Jessie Sampter, Disability, and Gender in the Yishuv"
January 29, 2019
Sarah Imhoff, Indiana University - Bloomington
- "Embodying the Database: Race, Gender, and Social Justice"
March 12, 2019
Dorothy Kim, Brandeis University
- "The Crisis of the American Jewish Intellectual: Marxism, God, and Jewish Identity in the 1940s"
April 9, 2019
Tony Michels, University of Wisconsin - Madison
Participating in the Colloquium
Presenters discuss a work-in-progress made available in advance. Following a brief overview (5-10 minutes), the presenter opens the floor to questions, critiques, suggestions, and general discussion.
Papers, which are not to exceed 30 pages, will be made available online two weeks before each colloquium session.
Presenting at the Colloquium
To submit your works-in-progress for presentation at the Jewish Studies Colloquium, please contact Sylvia Fuks Fried or Eugene Sheppard.