Graduate Students
The Chicago Center for Jewish Studies was created as an inter-divisional center in the Divisions of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Divinity School whose aim is to nurture dialogue among the many disciplines, scholars, and students engaged in Jewish Studies at the University. Our students come from a wide range of departments. The following is a list of our current students (with their academic advisor) and their academic interest(s).
Anthropology Department
Yaqub Hilal, (Silverstein, Michael), Migratory Bedouin communities in Israel
Anna Jabloner, (Masco, Joseph), Genetics, kinship, capitalism, identity, biopolitics
Art History Department
Michael Tymkiw (Mehring, Christine), Nazi exhibition design, modernism, and race
Committee on Jewish Studies
Igor H. De Souza (Robinson, James T.), Medieval Jewish philosophy, hermeneutics, and literary genres in medieval Jewish philosophical writing
Joanna Nemeh, Jewish gender identity, specifically within folktale
Committee on Social Thought
Anastasia Artemyev Berg (Pippen, Robert), Medieval Jewish thought, Spinoza
Lauren Butler Bergier (Pavel, Thomas), Dreyfus Affair, Jewish history and culture in France, Jewish-Christian relations
Avner Inbar (Pippen, Robert)
Alexander Orwin
William Wood (Pippen, Robert)
Comparative Literature Department
Johanna Theresa Semler (Meltzer, Francois), Animals and humans in Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda and post-Holocaust literature
Divinity School
Jessica Andruss (Robinson, James T.), Medieval Jewish and Muslim scriptural exegesis
Miriam Bilsker (Mendes-Flohr, Paul), Modern Jewish Intellectual History
Ezra Blaustein (Robinson, James T.), Medieval Jewish and Muslim intellectual history
Samuel H. Brody (Mendes-Flohr, Paul), Modern and contemporary Jewish thought, ancient comparative exegesis, intersections of hermeneutics and politics
Kristel Clayville (Schweiker, William), Hebrew Bible
Joshua Connor (Mendes-Flohr, Paul), Modern Jewish thought, concepts of the soul, and the relation between science and religion
Matthew Creighton (Mendes-Flohr, Paul)
Raphael Dascalu (Robinson, James T.)
Jessie DeGrado (Chavel, Simi), Hebrew Bible
Erik Dreff (Robinson, James T.), Medieval Jewish Thought, Spinoza
Jeffrey Fowler (Hector, Kevin), Doctrinal theology and Jewish-Christian theological relations
David Frankel (Robinson, James T.), Medieval Jewish and Islamic Intellectual History
Kelli Gardner (Chavel, Simeon), Hebrew Bible, Wisdom Literature and Gender
David Gottlieb (Fishbane, Michael), Rabbinic thought and Jewish cultural memory
Stephen Hall (Fishbane, Michael), Hebrew Bible
Elizabeth Hopp-Peters (Fishbane, Michael), Hebrew Bible
Ruchama Johnston-Bloom (Mendes-Flohr, Paul), Hybrid identities
Liane Marquis (Stackert, Jeffrey), Hebrew Bible
Katharine Mershon (Rosengarten, Richard A.), American Jewish Literature
Chaim Neria (Robinson, James T.)
Gary Shapiro (Fishbane, Michael), Rabbinic literature, Hellenistic Judaism, constructive Jewish theology
Yonatan Shemesh (Robinson, James T.), Medieval Jewish thought
Sam Berrin Shonkoff (Mendes-Flohr, Paul), Modern Jewish intellectual history, concepts of revelation, Biblical hermeneutics
Jordan Skornik (Stackert, Jeffrey), Biblical and ancient Near Eastern thought and poetics
Pesach Weinstein, History of Religions
Ori Werdiger (Mendes-Flohr, Paul)
Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg (Robinson, James T.), The history of the Jewish book, Jewish-Christian relations, and the reception history of the Hebrew Bible
Sarah Yardney (Stackert, Jeffrey), Hebrew Bible
Alexandra Zirkle (Mendes-Flohr, Paul), 18th-10th Century Jewish thought and Jewish-Christian relations
Germanic Studies Department
Bastian Reinert (Lüdemann, Susanna), Jewish-German literature: post-war poetry (Paul Celan); Holocaust testimony and (false) autobiography (Ruth Klüger, Binjamin Wilkomirski); posthumous voice in post-war drama (Elfriede Jelinek)
Andrea Wald (Buch, Robert), The intersection of (Lacanian) psychoanalysis, political theology, and aesthetic theory; Weimar Republic novels of Irmgard Keun and Marieluise Fleisser
Joela (Zeller) Jacobs (Wild, Christopher), German-Jewish literature
History Department
Aidan Beatty (Auslander, Leora) Israeli History, Zionist Thought.Natalie Belsky (Fitzpatrick, Sheila), Soviet Jewish history
Uri Shachar (Nirenberg, David), Ideologies of holy warfare – intellectual encounters between Jews, Christians & Muslims during the time of the crusades, with a focus on France and the Crusading Near East
Ori Yehudai (Wasserstein, Bernard), Emigration from Palestine and Israel 1881-1951
Comparative Human Development Department
Tracey Jones
Roscoe Nicholson Dissertation: How Primary Care Physicians View the Impact of Specific Aspects of Religion on Psychological Well-Being
Music Department
Rachel Adelstein (Bohlman, Philip), Modern Jewish liturgical song, Holocaust music
Iddo Aharony (Ran, Shilamit), Jewish and Israeli music, literature and culture
Michael Figueroa, Music of the Middle East, Jewish music, historiography, cultural geography, postcolonial studies, history of ethnomusicology
Meredith Aska McBride, American Jewish popular music (20th and 21st centuries), critical whiteness studies and Euro-American ethnic cultures, musical transnationalism and American immigration history, diaspora studies, urban cultural geography of Jewish music
Lillian Wohl (Bohlman, Philip), Ethnomusicology. Jewish musical performance, memory and history, Latin American Music, Jewish Latin America. Dissertation: “Mucho Ojo! Spectacles of Jewish Memory, Ethnicity and Religion in Contemporary Musical Performance in Buenos Aires”
NELC Department
Samuel Lanham Boyd (Pardee, Dennis), Near Eastern Judaica. Dissertation: “Contact Linguistics and Textual Reuse in the Hebrew Bible: A Socio-linguistic Approach to the Comparative Method in the Hebrew Bible”
Aaron Butts (Hasselbach, Rebecca), Comparative Semitics. Dissertation: “Language Maintenance, Lexical Borrowing, and Grammatical Replication: The Case of Greek and Syriac”
David M. Calabro (Pardee, Dennis), Hebrew Studies/Near Eastern Judaica, ritual gestures. Dissertation: “Doing Things with Hands: The Ritual Use of Hand Gestures in Northwest Semitic Literature and Iconography”
Annie Greene (Bashkin, Orit), Ottoman/Modern Iraqi history and Arabic-Hebrew literature
Humphrey (Chip) Hardy (Pardee, Dennis), Northwest Semitic Philology. Dissertation: “Diachronic Development in Biblical Hebrew Particles: A Case Study in Grammaticalization”
Eric Paul Jobe (Golb, Norman), Northwest Semitic Philology. Dissertation: “Innovation in Post-Biblical Hebrew Poetry: A Stylistic Analysis of Qumran, Hekhalot, and Payyetanic Poetry”
Nathan Mastnjak (Pardee, Dennis), Northwest Semitic Philology
Matthew James McAffee (Pardee, Dennis), Northwest Semitic Philology. Dissertation: “A Lexical and Literary Analysis of Life and Mortality in Ugaritic”
Charles Joseph Otte III (Pardee, Dennis), Northwest Semitic Philology
William Douglas Pickut (Golb, Norman), Northwest Semitic Philology. Dissertation: “Literary Genres in Poetic Texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls
Min Won Song (Pardee, Dennis), Northwest Semitic Philology
Vincent Johannes van Exel (Schloen, David), Ancient Near East History specifically Syria-Palestine
Jacqueline Eliza Vayntrub (Pardee, Dennis), Northwest Semitic Philology. Dissertation: “Proverbs and the Limits of Poetry”
Monique Denise Vincent (Schloen, David), Ancient Near East History specifically Syria-Palestine. Dissertation: “Households, Communities, and Dimensions of Social Identity in the Early Iron Age at Tall al-‘Umayri”
Liran Yadgar (Lewis, Frank), Judaism and Islam
Romance Languages and Literatures Department
James Nemiroff, Early Modern Spain
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