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Jonathan M. Hess
Professor Hess's book, Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002) was awarded honorable mention for the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literature and was also cited by Choice magazine as an outstanding academic title for 2003. He is also the author of Reconstituting the Body Politic: Enlightenment, Public Culture and the Invention of Aesthetic Autonomy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), as well as numerous articles on German literature, aesthetics and intellectual history. Professor Hess has received grants from the National Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. He is currently working on a book entitled Fictions of a Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Jewish Identity: Jewish Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Professor Hess has served as the Director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies since fall 2003. He regularly teaches both a first-year seminar on the German-Jewish experience and an undergraduate lecture course on Jews in German Culture, as well as more specialized seminars in German-Jewish cultural studies at the graduate level. Jewish Studies Courses Taught:
Marcie Cohen Ferris
Ferris has worked in the field of museums and public history for over twenty years, where she has focused on public programs, interpretation, and administration. Her experience includes the Norlands Living History Center in Livermore, Maine; Colonial Williamsburg, Williamsburg, Virginia; Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth, Massachusetts; the international program division at Elderhostel in Boston, Massachusetts; the Center for Public Service and Continuing Education at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi; the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience in Utica, Mississippi; and the Weaving Women's Words Oral History Project of the Jewish Women's Archive in Brookline, Massachusetts. Ferris, a noted scholar of the Jewish experience in the American South, joined the faculty in American Studies in 2004, where she regularly teaches “Shalom Y'all: The Jewish Experience in the American South.” In the spring of 2005, she created two new seminars, one exploring the history of American Jewish women, and the other examining the meaning of food in American culture. Ferris has published articles in numerous journals and anthologies, including Southern Cultures, Southern Jewish History, Cornbread Nation 1 and 2: The Best of Southern Food Writing, ed. John Egerton (2002 and 2004), American Jewish Women: An Historical Reader from Colonial Times to the Present, ed. Pamela Nadell (2002), and Shalom Y'all: Images of Southern Jewish Life in America, photographs by Bill Aron, edited by Vicki Reikes Fox with Bill Aron and Marcie Cohen Ferris (2002). She was associate producer for The Natchez Jewish Experience (1995), a video documentary on the history of the Jewish community in Natchez, Mississippi. Ferris is co-editor with Mark Greenberg of A New History of the Southern Jewish Experience, an anthology to be published by University of New England Press on behalf of Brandeis University, and her Matzah Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South will be published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2005. Jewish Studies Courses Taught:
Yaakov Ariel
Before coming to the University of North Carolina, Ariel taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he was three times chosen "teacher of the year" by annual student surveys. Professor Ariel's areas of scholarly interest include: Judaism and Evangelical Christianity in America and the relationship between the two religious communities. He has investigated the evangelical messianic faith and its impact on Christian interest in Jews and Israel, and is currently studying the Jewish movement of Return to Tradition. Among his publications are the books: On Behalf of Israel: American Fundamentalist Attitudes Towards the Jewish People and Zionism (1991) and Evangelizing the Chosen People: Missions to the Jews in America 1880-2000 (2000) (awarded the American Society of Church History’s Albert C. Outler Prize). He has also published articles in journals such as Church History; Religion and American Culture; Fides et Historia; American Jewish Archives; Studies in Contemporary Jewry; and Studies in Church History. Promoting his areas of interest in the community at large, Ariel has also taken part in and organized seminars and colloquia on contemporary Judaism and Jewish-Christian relations. Ariel is currently the director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Religious Studies. Jewish Studies Courses Taught:
Jonathan Boyarin
His research and writing combine his backgrounds in anthropology and Yiddish culture to point toward new pathways in the study of Jewish culture. His first book, as co-editor, was From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry (1983 and 1998), which served as an introduction for younger, English-speaking Jews to first-hand accounts of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. This was followed by Polish Jews in Paris: The Ethnography of Memory (1991), based on his dissertation fieldwork in Paris, and by a volume on the life history of Yiddish scholar Shlomo Noble. Further ethnographic and critical essays, including some dealing with the contemporary Lower East Side in New York, were published in Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory (1992) and Thinking in Jewish (1996). He edited and contributed to The Ethnography of Reading (1993) and Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace (1994). With his brother, Daniel Boyarin, he co-edited Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies (1997). His interest in Zionism, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and revaluation of diaspora in contemporary Jewish life is reflected in Palestine and Jewish History (1996) and (again with Daniel Boyarin) Powers of Diaspora (2002). His interests in the relation between Jewishness and legal theory resulted in a study published in the Yale Law Journal regarding a controversy surrounding a school board in a contemporary Hasidic community, in addition to a journal article on Jewishness, law, and psychoanalysis. He is currently working on a study and translation from Yiddish of the last book published by Abraham Joshua Heschel, while completing a manuscript on the relation between Jewish difference in late medieval Europe and the dynamics of the colonial encounter in Latin America. Boyarin has given guest lectures at a number of outstanding universities and has presented papers on numerous occasions throughout the United States, Canada and England. He teaches courses on a range of topics, including "Contemporary Jewish Identities," "Studying Jews: Contemporary Approaches," and "Messiah and Modernity." Jewish Studies Courses Taught:
Christopher Browning
Prof. Browning specializes in the history of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany and regularly offers a course on the History of the Holocaust (HIST 50). He has also offered undergraduate seminars on “Life and Death in the Polish Ghettos” and the historiography of National Socialism. His research has focused on two aspects of the Holocaust: the decision-making process that launched the Final Solution and the motivation of the perpetrators. He has published seven books in the field of Holocaust Studies, including two that have been awarded the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category: Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1993) and The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (2004). Professor Browning was invited to deliver the George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge University in 1999, published as Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers, and the George L. Mosse Lectures at the University of Wisconsin in 2002, published as Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony. His current research project is to write a history of the Nazi factory slave labor camps for Jewish workers in Starachowice, a small industrial town in central Poland. The primary source for this project is some 250 survivor testimonies that have been given over the past 60, from the summer of 1945 to interviews in 2004. Jewish Studies Courses Taught:
Erin G. Carlston
In 2003, she offered the first course the English Department has ever listed in Jewish-American literature, now a regular part of the curriculum; the class focused on questions about Jewish identity in the 20th century and how it relates to gender, class, and sexuality. Professor Carlston's research concentrates on the intersections of comparative modernisms, sexuality studies, and Jewish studies. She is the author of Thinking Fascism (1998), which examines the relationship of 1930s women intellectuals to fascism, and has also written articles on Marcel Proust, Paul Celan, Mary Renault, and Audre Lorde, among others. She is currently working on a book manuscript called Double Agents, on literary responses to espionage trials involving Jews, homosexual men, and/or communists; the first part of this work treats Proust's reaction to the infamous Dreyfus Affair in France, and the last part will look at the Rosenberg trial and Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning play "Angels in America." Jewish Studies Courses Taught:
Carl Ernst (Ex-Officio)
Current projects include Muslim interpretations of Hinduism and questions of print culture and communications technology in Islamic societies. His publications include Sufi Martyrs of Love: Chishti Sufism in South Asia and Beyond (co-authored with Bruce Lawrence, 2002); Teachings of Sufism (1999); a translation of The Unveiling of Secrets: Diary of a Sufi Master by Ruzbihan Baqli (1997); Guide to Sufism (1997); Ruzbihan Baqli: Mystical Experience and the Rhetoric of Sainthood in Persian Sufism (1996); Eternal Garden: Mysticism, History, and Politics at a South Asian Sufi Center (1993); and Words of Ecstasy in Sufism (1985). He studied comparative religion at Stanford University (A.B. 1973) and Harvard University (Ph.D. 1981), and has done research tours in India (1978-79, 1981), Pakistan (1986, 2000), and Turkey (1991), and has also visited Iran (1996, 1999) and Uzbekistan (2003). He has taught at Pomona College (1981-1992) and has been a visiting lecturer in Paris (1991, 2003) and Seville (2001). A faculty member of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since 1992, and department chair 1995-2000, he is now Zachary Smith Professor. William R. Ferris
Jeff Spinner-Halev
Before coming to Carolina, Spinner-Halev was the Schlesinger Professor of Political Science and Judaic Studies at the University of Nebraska. He has won teaching awards at the University of Nebraska and as a teaching assistant at the University of Michigan. Spinner-Halev is the author of The Boundaries of Citizenship: Race, Ethnicity and Nationality in the Liberal State (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994) and Surviving Diversity: Religion and Democratic Citizenship (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) and co-editor of Minorities within Minorities: Equality, Right and Diversity (Cambridge University Press, 2005). His current project examines the shape of collective memory and historical injustice in contemporary democracies. Spinner-Halev has been a Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, a Lady Davis Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, also at Hebrew University. He has taught at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzilya, Israel. He has also served on the Executive Council of the American Political Science Association. Cary Levine Cary Levine is an assistant professor of art history, specializing in contemporary art and visual culture. He received his Ph.D. (2006) from the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and is a recent recipient of a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (2007-08). Currently, he is writing a book on the work of Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy and Raymond Pettibon, three artists working in Southern California since the 1970s. Levine's research focuses on strategies of cultural politics in art, the miscegenation of art and music, and issues of subculture, gender, sexuality and popular culture. Before coming to UNC in 2007, Levine taught at numerous colleges in New York City, including Pratt Institute, Hunter College and Brooklyn College. In addition to his scholarship and teaching, he has been an active art critic, writing for magazines such as Art in America and BOMB, as well as other publications. Levine has also written numerous essays for exhibition catalogues and worked in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (1999-2002). Madeline Levine
Prof. Levine is a specialist in Polish literature and an award-winning literary translator. She teaches courses on modern Russian and Polish literature, comparative East European literature, and literary translation. Her interest in the Jewish experience in Poland and Russia, especially as it has been represented in fiction and poetry by Jewish and non-Jewish authors writing in Polish, Russian and Yiddish, is reflected in both her teaching and her publications. Her regularly offered courses, “Imagined Jews: Jewish Themes in Polish and Russian Literature” (JWST 164/SLAV 164) and “Literature of Atrocity: The Gulag and the Holocaust in Russian and East European Literature” (JWST 165/SLAV 165/PWAD 165), are obviously concerned with the Jewish experience in Eastern Europe. Several other courses that she teaches also have a significant Jewish-studies component, for it is impossible to study modern Polish or Russian literature without attention to such major Jewish literary figures as, for example, the Yiddish writer I.B. Singer and the Polish-Jewish prose master Bruno Schulz, whose works are studied in “Twentieth-Century Polish Literature” (JWST 112/PLSH 112), and the great Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam, a central figure in the graduate seminar, “Post-Symbolist Poetry” (RUSS 267). Works translated by Prof. Levine that explore the lives of Jews in Poland include Polish-Israeli writer Ida Fink's short stories about the Holocaust, collected in A Scrap of Time and Other Stories (1987); Bogdan Wojdowski's harrowing autobiographical novel of childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto, Bread for the Departed (1997); and Agata Tuszynska's meditative reportage, Landscapes of Memory: In Search of Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Jews of Poland (1998). A translated collection of stories by Hanna Krall, a writer whose themes spring from her own experience as a hidden child during the Holocaust, is forthcoming in 2005 under the title The Woman from Hamburg and Other True Stories. Several of Levine's scholarly articles on Polish-Jewish themes have been translated into Polish for publication in Poland. Jewish Studies Courses Taught:
Jodi Magness
She received her B.A. in Archaeology and History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1977), and her Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology from the University of Pennsylvania (1989). From 1990-92, Professor Magness was Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Syro-Palestinian Archaeology at the Center for Old World Archaeology and Art at Brown University. Professor Magness’ book on The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002) won the 2003 Biblical Archaeology Society's Award for Best Popular Book in Archaeology in 2001-2002 and was selected as an “Outstanding Academic Book for 2003” by Choice Magazine. Professor Magness' other books are The Archaeology of the Early Islamic Settlement in Palestine (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003); Debating Qumran: Collected Essays on Its Archaeology (Leuven: Peeters, 2004); Hesed ve-Emet, Studies in Honor of Ernest S. Frerichs (co-edited with S. Gitin; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998); and Jerusalem Ceramic Chronology circa 200-800 C.E. (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1993). In addition, she has published numerous articles in journals and edited volumes. Her research interests, which focus on Palestine in the Roman, Byzantine, and early Islamic periods, include ancient pottery, ancient synagogues, Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Roman army in the East. Professor Magness has participated on 20 different excavations in Israel and Greece, including co-directing the 1995 excavations in the Roman siege works at Masada. From 1997-99 she co-directed excavations at Khirbet Yattir in Israel. Professor Magness now co-directs excavations in the late Roman fort at Yotvata, Israel (since 2003). All of Professor Magness' courses at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (through the Department of Religious Studies) are offered for credit through the Center for Jewish Studies. They include an “Introduction to Early Judaism,” which is an undergraduate survey offered every fall, and undergraduate and graduate level seminars drawing on her research interests (such as “Ancient Synagogues,” “The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls,” and “Diaspora Judaism in the Roman World”). In 1997-98 Professor Magness was awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and a fellowship in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., for a research project on The Archaeology of the Early Islamic Settlement in Palestine. In 2000-2001, Professor Magness was awarded the following fellowships for her book on The Archaeology of Qumran: a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship for College Teachers; the Annual Professorship at the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem (declined); and a Skirball Visiting Fellowship at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. For spring 2005, Professor Magness received a Fulbright Lecturing Award through the United States-Israel Educational Foundation, to teach two courses at the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Professor Magness is Vice-President of the Board of Trustees of the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, and is a member of the Managing Committee of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. She has also been a member of the Governing Board of the Archaeological Institute of America and of the Board of Trustees of the American Schools of Oriental Research. She served as President of the North Carolina Society of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) and was President of the Boston Society of the AIA. Jewish Studies Courses Taught:
Luceil Friedman
Ms. Friedman studied Education at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem where the emphasis of her studies was teaching Hebrew as a modern foreign language to non native speakers. She has previously served as an Associate Instructor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, and was a Hebrew specialist on the faculty of the New Jewish High School of Greater Boston. Ms Friedman has also served on the College Board SATII Hebrew Language Test Development Committee. She will serve as faculty advisor to the newly formed Carolina Students for Israel campus organization. The current six course sequence is designed to facilitate students’ progress toward becoming articulate readers, writers, and speakers of Modern Hebrew. The courses are heavily grammar-based, a key that enables English speakers to comprehend and master the Hebrew language – a Semitic language based on a root system. By the end of the Elementary sequence, classes are conducted exclusively in Hebrew with the exception of ongoing explanations of grammatical structures and rules. By the end of the Intermediate level, students will have mastered all the requisite grammar skills necessary to read, write and speak. They will then advance to novels, essays, poetry, etc., while continuing to expand their vocabulary base. In addition to class work, students regularly listen to tapes designed to facilitate fluency and proper accent. The program began in 2003-04 with 12 students enrolled. Over 40 students will be enrolled in Modern Hebrew language during the 2004-05 academic year. Gang Yue Gang Yue received his Ph.D in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon in 1993. He teaches courses in Chinese language, modern Chinese literature and cultural studies, and Asian American studies. His current research is concerned with Chinese cultural production of Tibetan themes, the development of the “Shangri-La” eco-tourism zone in Eastern Tibet, and recent social changes in the multi-ethnic regions of Qinghai and Gansu Provinces in Northwestern China. |
