Support the ProgramJewish Studies Program at Miami University
Faculty
Rachel Adelman (REL)
Rachel Adelman, Assistant Professor in Ancient Jewish Literature/Rabbinics, completed her Ph.D. in Hebrew Literature (with a specialty in Midrash) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. For ten years, she taught at Matan (The Sadie Rennert Women's Institute for Torah Study) and other venues in Jerusalem, and has lectured widely in North America and England. She has published numerous academic articles, and her first book, The Return of the Repressed: Pirqe deRabbi Eliezer and the Pseudepigrapha, will be published this fall (Leiden: Brill). She also writes a monthly column, "Kol Isha," for the Jerusalem Post. When she is not writing books and articles, it is poetry that flows from her pen.
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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.
Steven DeLue (POL)
Steven DeLue, Professor of Political Science, teaches courses on Western political thought, including thinkers that extend from the classical period to the present. He has written on important Jewish thinkers, including Martin Buber, Moses Maimonides, and Benedict Spinoza. His published work also includes several books and numerous articles on various topics in Western political thought, including Political Obligation in a Liberal State and Political Thinking, Political Theory, and Civil Society, now in its third edition and translated into Arabic. His main interest is with the modern Enlightenment, especially with respect to its contribution to establishing liberal democracy.
Mila Ganeva (GER)
Mila Ganeva is Associate Professor of German and a member of the Film Studies and Jewish Studies Programs at Miami University, Ohio. Her research interests include mass media, film history, the Holocaust, and contemporary German film. She has published numerous articles on fashion journalism, fashion photography, and department stores mannequins in the Weimar Republic, early German film comedies, and Berlin in film. She is author of the book Women in Weimar Fashion: Discourses and Displays in German Culture, 1918-1933 (Camden House, 2008).
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.
Eric Goodman (ENG)
Eric Goodman, Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing, is the author of 4 novels, a handful of short stories and more than 150 articles and essays on food, travel, eating disorders, world cultures and golf that have appeared in publications including Saveur, Glamour, Travel & Leisure, GQ, and the Los Angeles Times Traveling in Style. All of his published novels seem to include Jewish characters from Brooklyn, where he was born and raised before leaving to attend Yale and Stanford. His most "Jewish-y" novel, In Days of Awe, tells the story of the fall and rise to redemption of Jewish Joe Singer, a disgraced pitcher for an unnamed National League team in New York. Within the Jewish Studies Program, he will be teaching a course on Jewish American literature after World War II.
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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 (Ph.D. 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 442): "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.
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."
Martha Schoolman (ENG)
Martha Schoolman (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 2005) is Assistant Professor of English and specializes in US literature. Her research focuses on the US antislavery movement and its post-Civil War cultural reverberations. She harbors something between a scholar's and a fan's interest Jewish-American literature from the 1890s to the present.
Benjamin Sutcliffe (RUS)
Ben Sutcliffe received his Ph.D. 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.