The Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan has announced its list of fellows for the 2018-19 academic year.
Established through a generous financial contribution from the Jean and Samuel Frankel Jewish Heritage Foundation, the Frankel Institute provides annual fellowships for scholars and artists from around the world to conduct research in relation to a given theme.
The institute, the only one of its kind at a public university in the United States, is committed to interdisciplinary, multilingual work spanning ancient times through the contemporary era. By combining intellectual autonomy with the ideal of a scholarly community, it offers global leadership in Jewish Studies.
This fall, the Frankel Institute will host a prestigious group of scholars who will gather around the theme “Sephardic Identities: Medieval and Early Modern.” Head Fellow Ryan Szpiech will lead them in their year of research.
The 2018–19 Frankel fellows and their fields of research are:
• Ilil Baum, Bar-Ilan University, “The Knowledge of Arabic among the Jews of the Crown of Aragon: Late Medieval Jewish Multilingualism as a Marker of an Elitist Culture.”
• Ross Brann, Cornell University, “Andalusi and Sefardi Exceptionalism.”
• Monica Aparicio Colominas, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, “Sephardic Exceptionalism in the anti-Jewish Polemics of Medieval Iberian Muslims.”
• Brian Hamm, University of Central Florida, “Being ‘Portuguese’ at the Diasporic Margins.”
• Marc Herman, Columbia University and Fordham University, “Andalusian Independence from Geonic Authority in its Mālikī and Almohad Contexts.”
• Maya Irish, Rice University, “Sephardic Exceptionalism and the Castilian Jewish Elites.”
• Martin Jacobs, Washington University (St. Louis), “Constantinople vs. Tenochtitlán: Imperial Expansion through a Post-Expulsion Sephardic Lens.”
• Ehud Krinis, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, “‘Duties of the Heart’ and the ‘Kuzari’ as Two Alternative Systematic Responses to the Hardships of the Jewish Communal life in al-Andalus.”
• Devi Mays, U-M, “The Sephardi Connection: Ottoman Jews, the Opium Trade, and the Aftereffects of Empire.”
• Sarah Pearce, New York University, “In the Taifa Kingdoms: The Medieval Poetics of Modern Nationalism.”
• Vaselios Syros, University of Jyväskylä (Finland), “Visions of History and Sephardic Identities: Medieval and Early Modern Perspectives.”
• Ryan Szpiech, U-M, “He is Still Israel? Conversion and Sephardic Identity before and after 1391.”
• Moshe Yagur, University of Haifa, “Who was a ‘Sepharadi’? A view from the Cairo Geniza.”
