People

Faculty || Affiliated Faculty || Visiting Faculty || Lecturers || Staff

Faculty (back to top)

Biale, DavidWebsite3238 SSH
David Biale is the Emanuel Ringelblum Professor of Jewish History. Last year he published a new book, Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol Between Jews and Christians (University of California Press, 2007) and has completed a draft of another book entitled "Not in the Heavens: An Intellectual History of Jewish Secularism." This year he will be editing the section on Judaism of the Norton Anthology of World Religions.
 
Janowitz, NaomiWebsite924 Sproul
Naomi Janowitz is Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Religious Studies Program. Her areas of interest are Judaism in the Greco-Roman context, Hellenistic religions, methods in the study of religions, and the psychoanalytic study of religion. Publications include: Icons of Power: Ritual Practices in Late Antiquity (Penn State Univ. Press, 2002) and Magic in the Roman World (Routledge, 2001). In 2005, she received a Distinguished Teaching Award. An article of hers about late antique Jewish attitudes towards art and idolatry appeared in the Nov 2007 History of Religions journal. Her current research is focused on the emergence of martyrdom in the ancient world.
 
Kelman, Ari Y.Website3120 Hart
Ari Y Kelman is Assistant Professor of American Studies and serves on the Jewish Studies Program Committee and the Executive Committee of the Cultural Studies Graduate Group. He is the author of Station Identification: A Cultural History of Yiddish Radio in the United States (University of California Press, 2009), and the editor of Iz Dis a System? A Milt Gross Comic Reader (NYU Press, 2009). He is also the co-author, with Steven M. Cohen, of a number of studies of contemporary Jewish identity and culture. He sits on the editorial boards of American Jewish History and the literary quarterly Guilt and Pleasure. His current research focuses on contemporary Christian worship music.
 
Maoz, ZeevWebsite246 SSH
Zeev Maoz is Professor of Political Science and Director of the International Relations Program. His recent book is Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel's Security and Foreign Policy (University of Michigan Press, 2006). He teaches the Arab-Israeli Conflict and International Politics of the Middle East.
 
Miller, SusanWebsite3219 SSH
Susan Gilson Miller is Associate Professor in History. She teaches courses on Mediterranean Jewish History, North African History, and urban history. Her research interests include cities and their stories, travel literature and the idea of travel in history, Jewish Mediterranean historiography, and Sephardic food cultures. Her most recent publication is The Architecture and Memory of the Minority Quarter in the Muslim Mediterranean City (Harvard University Press, January 2009).
 
Vidas, Moulie906 Sproul Hall
Moulie Vidas is an Assistant Professor in Religious Studies. He received a B.A. in Talmud and Jewish Philosophy from Tel Aviv University and did some graduate work at the Hebrew University before receiving a Ph.D. in late ancient religion from Princeton University in 2009. His dissertation, "Tradition and the Formation of the Talmud," examines the composition practices that formed the Babylonian Talmud and also places these practices in several conversations that took place between Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians in late ancient Mesopotamia.
 
Wolf, Diane L.Website2267 SSH
Diane L Wolf is Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Jewish Studies Program. Her recent publications include Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland (University of California Press, 2007) and Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas (Duke University Press, 2007). She teaches Contemporary American Jewish Identities and Communities. Her interests include family, gender, immigration, trauma, memory and identities, ethnography, and contemporary Jewish culture. She is currently researching contemporary Jews and their attitudes toward circumcision and comparing the post-memory of children of Holocaust survivors and children of Vietnamese war survivors and refugees.
 
Affiliates (back to top)
Arnett, CarleeWebsite413 Sproul Hall
Carlee Arnett is Associate Professor in the Department of German. Trained as a Germanic Linguist, her main areas of research are theoretical syntax, historical linguistics and second language acquisition. She has an interest in the syntax, history and instruction of Yiddish. She teaches German Jewish Intellectual Thought and is interested in Jewish cultures in the German speaking world, particularly current groups in Germany.
 
Brenda Deen Schildgen811 Sproul Hall
Brenda Deen Schildgen is Director and Professor of Comparative Literature. Her publications include Heritage or Heresy: Destruction and Preservation of Art and Architecture in Europe (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2008), the co-edited volume (with Gang Zhou and Sander Gilman) Other Renaissances (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2007), and the 1999 Choice Book Award Power and Prejudice: The Reception of the Gospel of Mark (Wayne State, 1999). Her research and teaching interests include the European Middle Ages, particularly Southern Europe, reception theory, the relationship between history and fiction, biblical hermeneutics, and interpretive theory. Schildgen recently was awarded the 2008 UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Scholarly Achievement.
 
Clarence E. WalkerWebsite3236 SSH
Clarence E. Walker is Professor of History and Cultural Studies. His books are: A Rock In A Weary Land The African Methodist Episcopal Church During the Civil War And Reconstruction, Deromanticizing Black History Critical Essays And Reappraisals, We Can't Go home Again: An Argument About Afrocentrism, Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten By Thomas Jefferson And Sally Hemings, and with Gregory Smithers The Preacher And The Politician: Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama and Race In America (University of Virginia Press, 2009) along with numerous articles. He has taught courses in Black American History, Comparative Slavery, The History of the Holocaust and American Negro Slavery, Race in America and Film.
 
Fisher, JaimeyWebsite409 Sproul Hall
Jaimey Fisher is Associate Professor of German. He is the author of Disciplining Germany: Youth, Reeducation, and Reconstruction after the Second World War (Wayne State UP, 2007); he is also co-editor, with Peter Uwe Hohendahl, of Critical Theory: Current State and Future Prospects (Berghahn, 2001). He has published essays on German film, literature, and intellectual history in various journals, including German Quarterly, New German Critique, Genre, iris, and Zeitschrift für Germanistik, among others. He has a particular interest in cinema about the Holocaust, one of the focuses of a volume he is currently co-editing, entitled Collapse of the Conventional, on post-1989 German cinema.
 
Hagen, WilliamWebsite4204 SSH
William Hagen is Professor of History specializing in German history. Among his many publications are Germans, Poles and Jews: the Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East, 1722-1914 (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980) and articles focusing on the German-Jewish reaction to violence against Jews in Poland. One of his current projects is focused on "Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1918-1920: Folk Vengeance and Apocalyptic Fears." He teaches a course on Eastern Europe and the Balkans in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Hist 143).
 
Materson, LisaWebsite3223 SSH
Lisa Materson is Assistant Professor of History. She specializes in Women's history and African American history. She is also interested in Jewish women's peace activism and the historical construction of Jewish racial identities. Her most recent book is titled For the Freedom of her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877-1932 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). She will be teaching a seminar on American Jews and racial construction in the United States in the spring 2009 quarter.
 
Watenpaugh, Heghnar ZeitlianWebsite210C Art
Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh is Associate Professor of Art History. Her research interests encompass architecture and urbanism in the Islamic world, especially the Ottoman empire, Syria, and Turkey; heritage and preservation; gender and space; and spatial practice of minority and marginal groups in Islamic society. She is the author of The Image of an Ottoman City and is currently working on "The Non-Muslims' Islamic City: A French Consul, a Jewish Merchant and an Armenian Pilgrim Narrate Ottoman Aleppo." Her courses include The Islamic City as well as Arts of the Islamic Book; both cover the contribution of minority groups, including Jews, to the visual arts of the Islamic world.
 
Watenpaugh, Keith DavidWebsite902 Sproul Hall
Keith David Watenpaugh is Associate Professor of Modern Islam, Human Rights and Peace in the Religious Studies Program. He is the author of Being Modern in the Middle East (Princeton, 2006). His courses of interest include RST 1E Fundamentalism, RST 90 Human Rights, and RST 131 Genocide. He is finishing a new book on the Middle East and the evolution of the modern human rights regime. Dr. Watenpaugh will be on leave during the academic year 2008-2009 to be the Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow in International Peace and the United States Institute of Peace.
 
Lecturers (back to top)
Galoob, Robert
Robert Galoob is a doctoral student in the Cultural and Historical Studies of Religion at the Graduate Theological Union and has an MA in Jewish Studies. His interests include Jewish-Christian relations, medieval Jewish history, Jewish martyrdom and anti-Semitism. He will teach the History of Anti-Semitism in Spring quarter.
 
Ofer Ashkenazi
Ofer Ashkenazi has a PhD in History from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He is the author of A Walk into the Night: Madness and Subjectivity in Weimar Film (forthcoming). His research interests include German-Jewish history, Zionist history, and the international peace movement of the interwar years. Ashkenazi has taught European, German and Israeli history and culture at the Hebrew University, Haifa University, and at the Technische Universitaet, Berlin. He is currently working on a book on pre-1948 Jewish sport and body-culture in Palestine. In Davis, Ashkenazi will be teaching History of Modern Israel.
 
Raab, Alon724 Sproul
Alon Raab has a degree in Jewish History with an emphasis on the ancient Near East. He taught at both the University of Oregon and at Portland State University for many years in the Department of Religious Studies (OU) and the Departments of Foreign Languages and History (PSU). He teaches first and second year Hebrew, The Bible through Film and the Israeli-Palestinian Encounter through Film and Literature.
 
Terry, Wendy R.
Wendy R Terry has a PhD in Christian Spirituality from the Graduate Theological Union and is a Lecturer in the Religious Studies Program. She regularly teaches the department's lower division survey courses, the upper division methods course required of majors and minors, as well as biblical studies courses. Her research foci include Christian Spirituality, History of Christianity, medieval mysticism, and the application of tools from Linguistics to the study of historical texts.
 
Staff (back to top)

Cara Chiaraluce
Graduate Coordinator