Each year, the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies invites scholars to Ann Arbor to pursue research projects on a general theme. For 2012-13, the group — led by U-M English Professor Jonathan Freedman — will gather around the theme of “Borders of Jewishness: Microhistories of Encounter.”
“The Frankel Institute hopes to foster an ongoing conversation among historians, literary critics, political scientists, students of religion, and anthropologists,” Freedman says. This theme year, he says, honors the interdisciplinary quality of scholarship and Jewish studies at U-M by bringing together a wide variety of scholars. They include historians, students of rabbinics and theological history, sociologists and political scientists, art historians and literary scholars.
The new fellows are:
❙ Freedman (head fellow), Marvin Felheim Collegiate Professor of English, American Studies and Judaic Studies; professor of English language and literature; professor of American studies, American Culture Program; and professor of Judaic studies, LSA
❙ Maya Barzilai, assistant professor of Judaic studies and of Near Eastern studies, LSA, “Monstrous Borders: The Golem Legend and the Creation of Popular Culture”
❙ Lois Dubin, Smith College, “Rachele and Her Loves: Marriage and Divorce in a Revolutionary Age”
❙ Jennifer Glaser, University of Cincinnati, “Exceptional Differences: Race, Chosenness, and the Postwar Jewish American Literary Imagination”
❙ Harvey Goldberg, Hebrew University, “Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives on Maghrib Border Processes”
❙ Kathryn Lavezzo, University of Iowa, “Mapping Jews and Christians in Medieval and Renaissance Literature: A Cultural Geography of English Antisemitism”
❙ Tatjana Lichtenstein, University of Texas-Austin, “A Life at Odds: The Private and Political Worlds of a Prague Zionist”
❙ Jessica Marglin, Princeton University, “The Assarrafs Go to Court: Jews in the Moroccan Legal System during the 19th Century”
❙ Isaac Oliver, graduate student instructor, Near Eastern studies, LSA, “Luke: Marginalized Jew in the Greco Roman Diaspora”
❙ Ranen Omer-Sherman, University of Miami, “Jewish Levantine Identities in the Contemporary Memoir & Fiction”
❙ Laurence Roth, Susquehanna University, “Unpacking my Father’s Bookstore: Collection, Commerce, Literature”
❙ Andrea Siegel, Pepperdine University, “An Experimental Foray: Calendar for Mother and Child and Mother and Child Yearbook”
❙ Lisa Silverman, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, “Beyond Material Claims: Rhetorics of Restitution after the Holocaust”
❙ Orian Zakai, of U-M, “Hebrew Women, Their Others, Their Nation”
For more information, go to www.lsa.umich.edu/judaic.
