What we are up to
Public lectures recently delivered, course launches, faculty publications, student honors, dispatches from travel seminars, and the small institutional news that adds up to a year. For what is still to come, see Forthcoming. The seasonal newsletter gathers a fuller account each Fall and Spring.
Vassar College is one of eight institutions to receive the top grade on the Anti-Defamation League’s third annual Campus Antisemitism Report Card.
Read the full citation
A weeklong faculty seminar (JWST 371) and a public lecture exploring American religious-liberty doctrine and its Jewish-legal antecedents. Read the full citation →
A senior historian of the Holocaust returns to first questions: what scholars have meant by “antisemitism,” how the term has shifted across the twentieth century, and what is at stake in its current public deployments. Read the full citation →
A leading historian of Jewish–Christian relations and the social history of the Roman Ghetto draws on his most recent book, Feeding the Eternal City: Jewish and Christian Butchers in the Roman Ghetto (Harvard, 2024). More on Lectures →
Marc Michael Epstein’s latest gathers two decades of work on Jewish visual and material culture. Early notices in academic journals and online.
An advanced course surveys the Synoptic Gospels against their first-century Jewish background.
Two weeks through the great Jewish, Muslim, and Christian capitals of medieval Iberia. Led by Marc Michael Epstein with Julie Harris (Northwestern), Ágnes Vetö, Victoria Atlas (Madrid), and Alex Spector Kobzev (Catalonia). Full account on Program History →
The Director is honored with the Center for the Study of Pluralism’s Maimonides Award for Excellence in Jewish Learning, recognizing a quarter-century of teaching at Vassar and a body of scholarship on Jewish visual and material culture — together with the warmth and pluralism that have shaped generations of students.
Affiliate faculty member Nancy Bisaha publishes From Christians to Europeans: Pope Pius II and the Concept of the Modern Western Identity (Routledge) — a study of how a fifteenth-century pope helped invent the idea of a common European belonging in response to the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople.
From the calendar archive
The Program’s faculty-led travel seminar has, over the years, taken students to Vienna, Berlin, Prague, Paris, Budapest, London, Florence, and Venice. The fuller chronology lives on Program History.
The Program is glad to consider submissions of news from alumni, current students, and affiliates — a publication notice, a fellowship, a forthcoming book. Write to maepstein@vassar.edu.
Accessibility · Public lectures and events are free and open unless otherwise noted. For disability accommodations, contact the Office for Accessibility and Educational Opportunity at aeo@vassar.edu · (845) 437-7584.