Marc Michael Epstein
Director of Jewish Studies
Mackie M. Paschall (1899) and Norman Davis Chair · Professor of Religion & Visual Culture · Direttore, Beit Venezia
Marc Michael Epstein is a scholar of Jewish visual and material culture, with particular interests in medieval and early modern Hebrew manuscripts, the visual lives of biblical and rabbinic narratives, and the long history of Jewish–Christian and Jewish–Muslim artistic exchange. He has taught at Vassar since 1992 and was the first Director of Jewish Studies. His current courses range across medieval Christianity; religion, art, and politics; the radical life of Jesus; Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights; Kabbalah; and JudaismS in their plurality.
His books include Dreams of Subversion in Medieval Jewish Art and Literature, The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative, and Religious Imagination (selected by the Times Literary Supplement as one of the best books of 2011), Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink: Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts (winner of the National Jewish Book Award, 2015), and People of the Image (Penn State Press, 2025). His current book in progress is titled Jewish Spaces in Christian Art, 1300–1800.
Epstein is a graduate of Oberlin College and received the Ph.D. at Yale University; much of his graduate research was conducted at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also directs Beit Venezia, the Home for International Jewish Studies in Venice.
marcmepstein.com · Vassar profile · Email
Alberto Gelmi
Assistant Professor of Italian
BA and MA, Università degli Studi di Milano · MA and PhD in Comparative Literature, The Graduate Center, CUNY (2021)
Three research veins: medieval and Early Modern Italian literature, especially Dante and Boccaccio and their reception; Italian-Jewish studies and translation from Hebrew, including Immanuel Romano and the long history of Jewish–Italian textual culture; and Italian linguistics and second-language acquisition.
Co-editor of Italia. Italie. Studi in onore di Hermann Haller (Mimesis, 2021) and Rappresentare per includere. Metodi, strumenti e testi per un italiano plurale (Franco Cesati, 2023). Teaches The Jews of Italy: History, Geography, Texts; a member of Vassar’s Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education.
Vassar profile
AJ Solovy
Assistant Professor of History
BA in History and English, Williams · MA in History, University of Vienna · PhD, University of California, Berkeley
Modern Europe with a focus on twentieth-century Germany and Austria; the Holocaust and its aftermath; right-wing extremism and democratisation; the history of medicine, eugenics, and race science.
Dissertation: Nazis After Hitler: A History of SS Members in Postwar Democracies — a transnational history of how former SS members reconstructed selves and pasts in West Germany, Austria, and across the postwar diaspora. Awarded the Konrad H. Jarausch Essay Prize (2024); Robert A. Savitt Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Joined the Vassar faculty in 2025.
Vassar profile
Rabbanit Dr. Ágnes (Ági) Vetö
Lecturer · Coordinator of Hebrew Language Study · Incoming Student Liaison
M.A., SOAS, University of London · M.A., Hebrew University, Jerusalem · M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., New York University · Rabbinic ordination, Yeshivat Maharat
Ágnes Vetö grew up in Budapest, the daughter of a Catholic mother and a father who converted from Judaism to Catholicism after the Shoah. Her growing awareness of her father's Jewish heritage led her into the “unofficial” study of Hebrew and Aramaic during a period when such language study was discouraged in academia, and into a lifelong commitment to learning. She holds advanced degrees from SOAS, Hebrew University, and NYU, where she completed her Ph.D. in Jewish Studies with an emphasis on Talmud and rabbinic literature. She has studied Talmud at the Pardes Institute and was ordained at Yeshivat Maharat, the first egalitarian-Orthodox seminary to ordain Jewish women in the Orthodox world.
Her trailblazing book, Fluid Masculinity: Impurity and Rabbinic Constructions of Gender, is forthcoming with SUNY Press. At Vassar she offers courses on topics in Jewish law including gender, conversion, and war; the Hebrew Bible (in translation); and the Jews as a cultural and political obsession. Fluent in four languages and widely traveled, she has been indispensable in conceptualizing, teaching, and guiding the Program's travel seminar.
agvetowebsite.netlify.app · Vassar profile · Email
Lecturer in Hispanic Studies
BA, Université Abdelmalek Essaâdi; MA, Stony Brook; MA, Universidad Internacional de Andalucía; PhD, Stony Brook. Hispano-Moroccan relations; colonialism and immigration; teaches Spain and Morocco: Colonization and Immigration. A polyglot working in Arabic, Spanish, German, English, and French.
Professor of History · Director of Medieval & Renaissance Studies
BA, Rutgers; PhD, Cornell (1997). Renaissance and medieval Italy; humanism and the formation of European identity; Christian–Muslim and Christian–Jewish encounter. Author of Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (UPenn, 2004; paperback 2006; Turkish translation 2012); co-translator of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini’s Europe (c. 1400–1458) (with Robert Brown; CUA, 2013); and From Christians to Europeans: Pope Pius II and the Concept of the Modern Western Identity (Routledge, 2023). She teaches The Crusades, The Dark Ages c. 400–900, and Constantinople / Istanbul: 1453, among others, and reviews for Speculum, the American Historical Review, Crusades, and CHOICE.
Professor of Greek and Roman Studies on the Sarah Mills Raynor Chair
BA, Barnard; MA, MPhil, PhD, Columbia. A Hellenist working on Homer, Herodotus, Greek tragedy, and classical reception. Author of Derek Walcott’s Encounter with Homer: Landscape, History, and Poetic Voice in ‘Omeros’ (Oxford UP, 2024). Co-led, with Jill Schneiderman, the 2014 Vassar travel course on the Jordan River Watershed (Israel, Jordan, and the West Bank).
Research Associate & Adjunct Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies
BA, Oberlin; MEM, Duke; MPP, Chicago; PhD, Carnegie Mellon. Energy and environmental policy, energy-systems modelling, and deep-decarbonisation strategy. Postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center (Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program; Project on Managing the Atom) and at Tel Aviv University’s Department of Public Policy. Roth’s research includes the economics of preserving existing U.S. nuclear plants as a carbon-abatement strategy; air-pollution damages from energy emissions; and — relevant to the Program — transboundary energy and water cooperation among Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority. At Vassar since 2025.
Professor of History
BA, Chicago; MA, PhD, NYU. Algerian, Middle Eastern, French, and Jewish histories; French colonialism in nineteenth-century Algeria; pre- and post-Crémieux North African Jewish communities. Author of Arabs of the Jewish Faith: The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria (Rutgers, 2010) and The Merchants of Oran: A Jewish Port at the Dawn of Empire, 1792–1856 (Stanford, 2017). Teaches The Roots of the Palestine–Israel Conflict and the team-taught dialogical seminar JWST 333.
Professor of Psychological Science
BA, MA, PhD, Cornell. Attachment theory and pair bonds in developmental and adult perspective; parenting and infant crying; co-author with Cindy Hazan of the foundational adult-attachment literature. Former Director of Jewish Studies (2009–10) and Dean of Studies (2019–21).
Associate Professor Emeritus of English (1984–2023)
BA, Sarah Lawrence; PhD, Columbia. American literature; Jewish studies; film, comics, music, and other forms of popular culture. Author of Tales of Adventurous Enterprise: Washington Irving and the Poetics of Western Expansion; essays on Jewish and African-American singers, Jewish women in vaudeville, Irish-American popular song, and Jewish Indians.
Professor Emeritus of Hispanic Studies (1983–2025)
PhD in Comparative Literature, Yale. Founding Director of Jewish Studies (2000–2003). Co-editor of the Key Words in Jewish Studies series (Rutgers UP) and author of its first volume, Jewish Studies: A Theoretical Introduction (2011); also The Routes of Modernity: Spanish American Poetry from the Early Eighteenth to the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Bucknell, 2002).
