Jewish Studies Program at Miami University
Faculty
Mia Biran (PSY)
Dr. Mia Weinberger Biran (biranmw@muohio.edu), Associate Professor, has been a faculty member of the Department of Psychology at Miami University since 1982. She is a clinical psychologist whose research interests have for some time focused on the study of anxiety disorders, effects of trauma, and immigration and acculturation. In recent years she has also developed a special interest in the study of the psychological aftermath of the Holocaust on the survivors and later generations. As an Israeli born psychologist she also is interested in the study of the impact of the Holocaust on Israeli Society, and Israel's social and psychological challenges at the present.
Vitaly Chernetsky (RUS)
Vitaly Chernetsky, Assistant Professor of Russian, teaches courses on Russian language and Russian and East European literature, film, and visual culture. His book Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization came out in 2007. His course "Cultures and Identities of Eastern Europe: An Introduction through Literature and Film," which will be first offered in the Spring 2008 semester, will prominently feature the representations of Jewish culture and experience in twentieth-century Eastern Europe.
Charlotte Newman Goldy (HST)
Charlotte Newman Goldy (goldycn@muohio.edu), Associate Professor of History, studies and teaches medieval Europe. She regularly teaches HST 346 Medieval Jewish History and is currently working on a micro-history of Muriel, a thirteenth-century Anglo-Jewish woman.
James Hanges (REL)
James Hanges, Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Religion, is a Miami (BA Classical Greek /MA Religion) Alumnus (Ph.D. University of Chicago, New Testament). His primary research interest is the migration of religions in the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean. This general interest includes Judaism, and the early Christian communities as developments within Judaism, as an evolving and migrating spectrum of related communities that both shape and are shaped by the cultural contexts into which they move. His classes consequently engage with questions that reflect a sociological approach to religious change within the larger context of societal changes. Such questions foster discussion of variation and not simply generalities, discontinuities and well as continuities.
Erik Jensen (HST)
Erik Jensen arrived at Miami University as an Assistant Professor of European history in 2004. His research interests include modern Germany, particularly the Weimar Republic, European social and cultural history, and the histories of gender and sexuality. He is currently completing a book entitled "Power Play: Sports, Gender, and the Modern Body in Weimar Germany."
Denise McCoskey (CLS)
Denise Eileen McCoskey is an Associate Professor in Classics and an Affiliate in Black World Studies. In 1995, she participated in an NEH Summer Institute on "The Image and Reality of Women in Ancient Near Eastern Societies," which explored topics related to Jewish women in antiquity, as well as women in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. McCoskey has published articles exploring various dimensions of social life and social identity in the Greco-Roman world, including "Disapora in the Reading of Jewish History, Identity, and Difference" and "Naming the Fault in Question: Theorizing Racism Among the Greeks and Romans." Her current book project examines the role of geography and empire in the conceptualization of sexual difference during the early Roman empire. In the Jewish Studies Program, she teaches CLS 310.J Jews Among the Greeks and Romans.
Kevin L. Osterloh (HST)
Kevin L. Osterloh (PhD Princeton University, 2007) is assistant professor in the Department of History at Miami University, specializing in ancient Judaica and the society and politics of the Greco-Roman World. His current research focuses on the reinvention of Jewish collective identity and ethnicity in the second-century BCE amidst a complex, triangulated conversation between Jews, Greeks and Romans. He teaches a course on Ancient Jewish History (HST 351): "Tradition and Identity: Jews and Judaism in the Persian and Greco-Roman Periods (539 BCE-200 CE)." In addition to aspects of Hellenistic Judaism and the Greco-Roman period, Osterloh is also deeply interested in the study of Hellenistic Historiography, and issues of rabbinic literature and society, in particular the invention by the rabbis of their own traditional collective authority, as found in Mishnah Tractates Avot and Yoma, and in the confluence of rabbinic folklore and dialectic in the Babylonian Talmud.
John Parks (ENG)
John G. Parks, Professor of English, began teaching at Miami University in 1972. His area of specialty is 20th-century American literature, especially fiction since 1945. John has published two essays on Edward Lewis Wallant during his career. He has also published a book-length study of the fiction of E.L. Doctorow as well as several essays on Doctorow's fiction for scholarly journals. John's courses on American literature since WW II always involve the teaching of the major Jewish-American writers, such as Bellow, Malamud, Roth, Salinger, Wallant, among others. His research in progress includes a study of recent fiction that treats the death of children, an essay on Richard Powers, and another on E.L. Doctorow. His course on Jewish American Writers Since 1945 is being offered in the Spring semester 2008.
Rachel Rachovitsky (HBW)
Rachel Rachovitsky, Instructor of Modern Hebrew, teaches beginning and intermediate Modern Hebrew. She has been a faculty member in the Department of German, Russian and East Asian Languages since 2004. She also taught Modern Hebrew at the University of Cincinnati for eight years and one year at Hebrew Union College. She incorporates Israeli culture into her Modern Hebrew classes. Rachel is a fourth-generation Israeli born in Jerusalem. Her interests are: teaching Hebrew, chanting Tropes, Israeli dancing, music, painting, and calligraphy.
Sven-Erik Rose (FRE)
Sven-Erik Rose (roses@muohio.edu), Assistant Professor of French and Italian, writes and offers a range of courses on Jewish literature and cultural history in Germany and France from the Enlightenment to the present, as well as on Jewish American Immigrant Literature and representations of the Holocaust. His recent publications include articles on French Jewish filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz's 1995 film Hate (La Haine), and on the 18th-century Jewish Kantian philosopher Lazarus Bendavid. He is currently working on a book with the tentative title "Discourses of Jewish Subjectivity in Germany 1789-1848."
James Rubenstein (GEO)
James Rubenstein (rubensjm@muohio.edu) is Professor of Geography. Dr. Rubenstein teaches courses in urban planning and is a certified planner. He is an auto industry analyst and is author of two books on the auto industry. He does not currently teach courses in Jewish Studies, but is author of the best-selling textbook in human geography, which includes a discussion of the geography of the Middle East.
Benjamin Sutcliffe (RUS)
Ben Sutcliffe received his PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures (University of Pittsburgh, 2004). He is Assistant Professor of Russian in the Department of German, Russian, East Asian Languages and works with the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies.