A Faculty of Scholars

Emeritus · English

Peter Antelyes

Associate Professor Emeritus of English

• Tales of Adventurous Enterprise: Washington Irving and the Poetics of Western Expansion (Columbia University Press, 1990).

Hispanic Studies

Omar Badessi

Lecturer in Hispanic Studies

Scholarship forthcoming

• Hispano-Moroccan relations; colonialism and immigration; the history of colonial medicine. Scholarly articles forthcoming.
• Translator, Martin H. Levinson, Practical Fairy Tales for Everyday Living (Institute of General Semantics, 2023).

History

Nancy Bisaha

Professor of History · Director of Medieval & Renaissance Studies

• Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
• Pope Pius II, Europe (c. 1400–1458), trans. Robert Brown, introduction & notes by Nancy Bisaha (Catholic University of America Press, 2013).
• From Christians to Europeans: Pope Pius II and the Concept of the Modern Western Identity (Routledge, 2023).

Emeritus · Founding Director

Andrew Bush

Professor Emeritus of Hispanic Studies · Founding Director of Jewish Studies

• The Routes of Modernity: Spanish American Poetry from the Early Eighteenth to the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Bucknell University Press, 2002).
• Jewish Studies: A Theoretical Introduction (Rutgers University Press, 2011) — Key Words in Jewish Studies, vol. 1.

Director of Jewish Studies

Marc Michael Epstein

Mackie M. Paschall (1899) and Norman Davis Chair · Professor of Religion & Visual Culture

• Dreams of Subversion in Medieval Jewish Art and Literature (Penn State University Press, 1997).
• The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative, and Religious Imagination (Yale University Press, 2011).
• Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink: Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts (Princeton University Press, 2015).
• People of the Image: Jews and Art (Penn State University Press, 2025).

Greek & Roman Studies

Rachel D. Friedman

Professor of Greek and Roman Studies, Sarah Mills Raynor Chair

• Derek Walcott’s Encounter with Homer: Landscape, History, and Poetic Voice in ‘Omeros’ (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Steering Committee · Italian

Alberto Gelmi

Assistant Professor of Italian

• Co-editor, Italia. Italie. Studi in onore di Hermann W. Haller (Mimesis, 2021).
• Co-editor, Rappresentare per includere. Metodi, strumenti e testi per un italiano plurale (Franco Cesati Editore, 2023).

Environmental Studies

Michael Buchdahl Roth

Research Associate & Adjunct Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies

• Isaac Kramer, Yaara Tsairi, Michael Buchdahl Roth, Alon Tal & Yair Mau, “Effects of population growth on Israel’s demand for desalinated water,” npj Clean Water 5 (2022): art. 67.

History

Joshua Schreier

Professor of History

• Arabs of the Jewish Faith: The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria (Rutgers University Press, 2010).
• The Merchants of Oran: A Jewish Port at the Dawn of Empire, 1792–1856 (Stanford University Press, 2017).

Steering Committee · History

AJ Solovy

Assistant Professor of History

Most recent work

• Nazi Afterlives: A History of Former SS Members in Postwar West German and Austrian Democracy (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2024).
• Recipient of the Konrad H. Jarausch Essay Prize (2024); Robert A. Savitt Fellow, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Hebrew Language Coordinator

Rabbanit Dr. Ágnes Vetö

Lecturer · Hebrew Language Coordinator

• Silent Revolutions: Halakhic Shifts and the Empowerment of Jewish Women (book in progress).
• “Reactivating Mi’un to Free Agunot Within the Framework of Halakhah,” Keren: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought (Yeshivat Maharat, 2024).
• “‘Sacred and Profane’: Naked Ladies in the Haggadah?” in Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink: Jewish Manuscript Illumination, ed. Marc Michael Epstein (Princeton University Press, 2015).
• Rabbinic Conceptualization of the Male Body as Reflected in the Halakhic System of Male Genital Emissions (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 2015).
• Also: “Written on the Body: Salome, Sotah, and Gynecology as Truth-Testing” (2019).

Psychological Science · former Director

Debra Zeifman

Professor of Psychological Science

• Debra M. Zeifman, “Attachment theory grows up: a developmental approach to pair bonds,” Current Opinion in Psychology 25 (2019): 139–143.