Arie M. Dubnov is a Senior Lecturer at the School of History and the Department of General History at the University of Haifa, Israel and, starting January 2017, will serve as the inaugural Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies at George Washington University. His fields of expertise are modern Jewish and European intellectual history, with emphasis on the history of political thought and a subsidiary interest in nationalism studies. Dubnov is the author of Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (2012), and the editor of Zionism – A View from the Outside (2010 [in Hebrew]), seeking to put Zionist history in a larger comparative trajectory. In addition, he has published essays in journals such as Nations & Nationalism, Modern Intellectual History, History of European Ideas, and The Journal of Israeli History. His current research project seeks to trace the genealogy of the idea of partition in the British interwar Imperial context, and to uncover other alternative, neglected federalist political schemes that were circulating at the time.

Matthew Silver received his BA from Cornell University and his MA and Ph.D in Modern Jewish History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests include American Jewish History, Zionism and Modern Jewish Literature. He has published a number of books in English and Hebrew, including Our Exodus: Leon Uris and the Americanization of Israel's Founding Story (2010), and In the Service of the West: A New Look at Modern Jewish History [Hebrew, 2014]. His 2013 volume, Louis Marshall and the Rise of Jewish Ethnicity in America was a National Jewish Book Award finalist. He is a Professor in the General Studies Department  at the Max Stern College of Emek Yezreel, and has taught and worked in various administrative positions there since 2000; for the last several years he has taught in a graduate program on American Jewish Studies at Haifa University, and he has been a Schusterman Fellow and visiting professor on sabbatical years at universities in North America. He is working on a volume pertaining to the rise of modern Jewish politics, 1870-1905.

Michael Kalber Silber is the Cardinal Franz Koenig Senior Lecturer in Austrian Studies, Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University where he served as the head of the department between 2003 and 2006. Since 2008, he is the Chairman of the Executive Board of the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People. He has also been a visiting professor at Harvard, Stanford and Yale. His research interests focus on early modern and modern Jewish history, in particular the history of Jews in the Habsburg Empire. He is engaged in among others, a family history of Baron Diego d’Aguilar over three centuries, spanning the Iberian peninsula, the Habsburg Monarchy and the British Empire; the reign of Joseph II and the Jews (1780-1790); the revolution of 1848-49 and the Jews in Hungary. Presently, he is working in the research group on Jews and Liberalism on a biography of Ignatz Einhorn/Ede Horn, a radical rabbi, revolutionary, journalist and politician in Hungary and France. Among his publications: "The Emergence of Ultra-Orthodoxy: the Invention of a Tradition," in The Uses of Tradition: Jewish Continuity since Emancipation, ed., Jack Wertheimer (1992); “From Tolerated Aliens to Citizen-Soldiers: Jewish Military Service in the Era of Joseph II,” Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe, edited by Pieter M. Judson and Marsha L. Rozenblit (2004); “The Making of Habsburg Jewry: Continuity and Change in the Long Eighteenth Century” (forthcoming in the Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 7: 1500-1815, edited by Jonathan Karp and Adam Sutcliffe). He has also served as editor of Jews in the Hungarian Economy, 1760-1945 (1992) and editor on Hungary and member of editorial board of YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (2008).

Michal Rose Friedman is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her PhD from the Department of History and the Institute of Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University in 2012. In 2015, she was a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies in Philadelphia. She is the author of several journal articles on the recovery of the legacy of Sepharad in modern Spain. Her book manuscript, in preparation, “Recovering Jewish Spain: Politics, Historiography and Institutionalization of the Jewish Past in Spain, 1845-1950” expands on her dissertation to discuss how Spain’s Jewish past became central to efforts to construct and claim a modern Spanish nation, as the legacy of Sepharad became an object of official scholarly inquiry and political debate. Recently, Friedman has begun to research the connections between Spanish sephardism and the project and discourse of hispanidad (hispanism) and mestizaje (racial mixing) in the Americas. At Oxford, she will focus on how modern Spain afforded Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jewish intellectuals and public figures that may have been excluded or marginalized elsewhere in Europe, a platform to exercise advocacy on behalf of Jewish and liberal causes from the nineteenth through the mid twentieth century.

Ari Joskowicz is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies, European Studies, and History at Vanderbilt University. He received his PhD in History and Jewish Studies from the University of Chicago (2008). His current book project traces the entanglement of Jewish and Romani (Gypsy) history in the twentieth and early twenty-first century, from the killing fields of Hitler’s Europe to the postwar creation of archives, debates over compensation, and contemporary Holocaust memorials. Among other questions, he seeks to understand how Jewish archives became important repositories of Romani narratives of suffering and how Jewish scholarship and the model of the Holocaust has shaped understandings of the Romani Holocaust. He has published two articles related to this project: “Romani Refugees and the Postwar Order” (Journal of Contemporary History, 2015) and “Separate Suffering, Shared Archives: Jewish and Romani Histories of Nazi Persecution” (History & Memory, March 2016). Other publications include: The Modernity of Others: Jewish Anti-Catholicism in Germany and France (Stanford University Press, 2014);  “Heinrich Heine’s Transparent Masks: Denominational Politics and the Poetics of Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century Germany and France,” German Studies Review (2011); “The Priest, the Woman, and the Jewish Family: Gender and Conversion Fears in 1840s France,” Jewish Quarterly Review (2011); “Jewish Anticlericalism and the Making of Modern Jewish Politics in Late Enlightenment Prussia and France,” in Jewish Social Studies (2011); “Selma the Jewish Seer: Female Prophecy and Bourgeois Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany” in the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies (2014). He is also the co-editor of Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). His work has been supported by fellowships from the American Society of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Lady Davis Foundation, the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, the American Philosophical Society, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Julia Phillips Cohen is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), which was awarded the 2015 Association for Jewish Studies Jordan Schnitzer Award in Modern Jewish History, the 2015 Barbara Jelavich Prize of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, the 2014 National Jewish Book Award for Writing Based on Archival Material, and honorable mention for the 2014 Salo W. Baron Book Prize, the 2014 the National Jewish Book Award for Sephardic Culture, and the 2015 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize. With Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Cohen is also co-editor of Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700-1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), which won the 2014 National Jewish Book Award in the category of “Sephardic Culture." Her article "Oriental by Design: Ottoman Jews, Imperial Style, and the Performance of Heritage" American Historical Review 119:2 (April 2014), which explores material she will be developing as a Polonsky Fellow at the OCHJS, was awarded the 2014 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians’ Article Prize for an article in any field of history other than the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality. She is currently serving as a board member of the International Journal of Middle East Studies, as Sephardi/Mizrahi Division Chair of the Association for Jewish Studies, and as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Association for Jewish Studies.

Lisa Moses Leff is Professor of History at American University in Washington, DC, where she teaches courses in modern European history and modern Jewish history.  Her research focuses on the Jews of modern France. She received her BA from Oberlin College and her PhD from the University of Chicago.  Her first book, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: the Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford, 2006) was about the French republican origins of Jewish international aid.  Her second book, The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust, explores issues of Jewish nationalism, the writing of Jewish history, and the aftermath of the Holocaust.  She has now begun work on a new project about the Panama Affair, a late nineteenth-century French financial and political scandal.

Malachi Haim Hacohen (PhD, Columbia) is Bass Fellow and Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Duke University, and Director of the Council for European Studies and of the Religions and Public Life Initiative at the Kenan Institute for Ethics.  His research focuses on Jewish European history, and he has published on the Central European Jewish intelligentsia, Cold War liberalism, nation and empire in Austrian history, and cosmopolitanism and Jewish Identity. His book Karl Popper – The Formative Years:  Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna won the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the AHA and the Victor Adler State Prize.  He has published essays in, among others, The Journal of Modern History, The Journal of the History of Ideas, History and Theory, Modern Intellectual History, History of Political Economy, Religions, Jewish Social Studies, Jewish Historical Studies, Journal of Modern Jewish History, and has edited a collection on Twentieth-Century Jewish Émigrés and the Shaping of Postwar Culture. He currently leads an international project on “Empire, Socialism and Jews“. His book Jacob & Esau: Jewish European History Between Nation and Empire is soon to be published by Cambridge University Press. At the Centre, he will be exploring the Jewishness of Cold War liberalism, seeking to illuminate the ways Jewish identity and experience shaped the “liberalism of fears” characteristic of a generation of Jewish intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic during the postwar years. Historians, sociologists and philosophers, they all viewed “totalitarianism” as modernity’s greatest challenge, and joined The Congress for Cultural Freedom to fight it. Cosmopolitan and secular to the core, seeking Jewish integration, they camouflaged specifically Jewish anxieties under the universal burden of modernity. The project will bring out their Jewishness and show it to be formative of postwar trans-Atlantic liberalism.

Simon Levis Sullam is Associate Professor of Modern History at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. He works on Italian history, modern Jewish history, the history of antisemitism and of the Holocaust. He was trained in Italy and the United States, where he did part of his doctorate (UCLA) and was an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow (University of California, Berkeley). He was also a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute (Fiesole, Florence) and a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. He is the author and editor of several books, including, with Martin Goodman and others, Toleration within Judaism (Littman 2013), Giuseppe Mazzini and the Origins of Fascism (Palgrave 2015), The Italian Executioners. Scenes from the Genocide of the Jews (1943-1945) (forthcoming with Princeton Univeristy Press).

Eitan Klein is an archaeologist, working in the Israel Antiquities Authority as the Deputy Director of the Antiquities Theft Prevention Unit and Inspector in charge of Antiquities Commerce in Israel. He is also a lecturer in the Israel Studies Department at Ashkelon Academic Collage and a Research Fellow in the Faculty of Jewish Studies at Ariel University. His PhD, on the Land of Judea during the Late Roman Period was written in Bar-Ilan University (2012). This thesis presented the architecture, art, religion, inscriptions and burial customs of the Roman and Jewish settlers in rural Judea in light of the written sources and the archaeological discoveries. His main field of interest is the Geography, History and Archaeology of the Land of Israel during the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine Periods, focusing on the following topics: (1) The Archaeology of the Jewish Settlement during the Second Temple Period and the Bar-Kokhba Revolt.(2) Settlement patterns and pagan cults in Judea during the Late Roman Period. (3) Underground cave research. (4) Historical-Geography of Judea during the Classical Periods. (5) Archaeology of the Judean Desert and Judean Foothills. His researches were published in tens of articles, such as: “Comment Regarding Roman Provincial City Coins Found in Refuge Caves in the Judean Desert” (Israel Numismatic Journal 18, 2015); "Settlement Processes in the Territorium of Roman Jerusalem (Aelia Capitolina)" (Proceedings XVIIIth, International Congress of Classical Archaeology, Vol. I: Centre and Periphery in the Ancient World, 2014); "The Nunnery at Ḥorvat Ḥani – Grave Site of Ḥannah, Mother of Samuel the Prophet?”, (Knowledge and Wisdom: Archaeological and Historical Essays in Honour of Leah Di Segni , 2014); “A City from the Biblical period in Khirbet esh-Shūna and its Possible Identification as 'Ha-Ramathaim-Zophim'”, (Al-Atar: Journal of Land of Israel Studies, 17, 2013 [Hebrew]); “In the Footsteps of Ancient Documents and Inscriptions – Hiding Complexes in the Southern Hebron Hills”, (Judea and Samaria Research Studies, 21, 2012 [Hebrew]); “A Rock-Cut Burial Cave from the Roman Period at Beit Nattif, Judaean Foothills”, (Israel Exploration Journal 61/2, 2011); “The Hercules Relief (Oscillum?) from Khirbet el-Karmil Reconsidered”, (Studies in Honour of Arnold Spaer – Israel Numismatic Journal 17, 2010); “The Origins of the Rural Settlers in Judean Mountains and Foothills during the Late Roman Period”, (New Studies on Jerusalem 16, 2010 [Hebrew]).

Dr. Eva Frojmovic lectures at the Centre for Jewish Studies in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. Her main scholarly interests are in Jewish art and visualities in medieval Christian Europe and in contemporary Jewish museums and heritage. She is completing a book about the adoption of visual media by Ashkenazi communities in the 1230s, and she is starting a new project on art and gender in medieval Jewish communities.

Jaclyn Granick completed her PhD in international history at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland in 2015 after reading Social Studies at Harvard as an undergraduate. She is currently working on a monograph, International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War based on her prize-winning doctoral research, which investigates American Jewish responses to Jewish suffering abroad from 1914-1929. As a Newton International Fellow of the British Academy, she is also beginning a new project on Jewish women’s internationalism and universalism in the long twentieth century. Her research interests include interactions among transnational non-governmental organizations, states, and international organizations; religious internationalism; history and historiography of Jewish diplomacy and philanthropy; late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century institutional and diplomatic history in the United States and Europe; humanitarianism, human rights, and social reform.

Julie Mell is Associate Professor of Medieval History and Coordinator of Jewish Studies at North Carolina State University.  Her research focuses on the economic stereotypes of Jewish moneylenders, Court Jews, and Jewish bankers in medieval and modern Europe and on the role of European émigrés and the Holocaust in transforming medieval and economic history.  Her publications include The Myth of the Medieval Jewish Moneylender (Palgrave, 2016); the co-edited Jewish Émigrés and the Shaping of Postwar Culture (MDPI, 2014); "Cultural Meanings of Money in Medieval Ashkenaz: On Gift, Profit, and Value in Medieval Judaism and Christianity" Jewish History (2014); "Hybridity in a Medieval Key:  the paradox of Jewish participation in self-representative political processes" Jewish Historical Studies (2012); and "Shared Urbanity:  the Walled City in Pre-Ghetto, German-Jewish Art" [German] Wiener Jahrbuch für Jüdische Geschichte Kultur und Museumswesen (2001).  During her time at the Centre, she will be working on two articles:  "Hannah Arendt, the Court Jew, and the Jewish Economic Function:  a critical re-evaluation of Arendt's 'Origins of Antisemitism'" and "German-Jewish Women and Economic History as Resistance to Nazi Antisemitism:  Selma Stern, Hannah Arendt, and Toni Oelsner." She is also beginning new projects which make use of Bodelian manuscripts: the penitential literature of the Hasidei' Ashkenaz movement and grotesques and fantastical beasts in Hebrew illuminated manuscripts.

Roman Vater obtained his PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Manchester in 2015. Previously, he studied Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Tel Aviv University (BA, 2004) and the Jagiellonian University (MA, 2010). His research interests include Hebrew nationalism (especially "Canaanism"), right-wing anti-Zionism, Israeli society and dissident politics and the Israeli-Arab conflict. Publications include: "'Down with Britain, away with Zionism': the 'Canaanites' and Lohamey Herut Israel between two adversaries" (Melilah, 2013) and "Beyond bi-nationalism? The Young Hebrews versus the 'Palestinian issue'" (Journal of Political Ideologies, forthcoming).

Ying Han is an Associate Professor in the School of International Studies, University of International Business and Economics in Beijing. She obtained PhD in British and American Literature from Beijing Foreign Studies University in 2012. Her academic interests are Jewish American novels, Jewish mysticism, Bible study, and feminist studies. Her main publications include the published doctoral dissertation, A Study of Jewish Mysticism in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Works (Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research P, 2013; in English); and several articles in Chinese: “Cultural Palimpsest: On Coelho’s The Alchemist” (Journal of Beijing International Studies University, 2015); “Traveling and Joining: On Rosen’s The Talmud and the Internet” (Foreign Literatures, 2014); “Jewish Mysticism in Singer’s Enemies: a Love Story” (Diaspora and Refuge: Unforgettable History of Jewish People. CJSS Jewish & Israel Studies Series, 2013); “The Theme of Return as Shown in Singer’s The Penitent” (Foreign Literature, 2012). She is also devoted to the translation of literature works into Chinese, which includes Jonathan Wilson’s novel A Palestine Affair (Sichuan Literature & Art Publishing House, 2010), and 11 short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer (collected in Gimpel the Fool: Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, People’s Literature Publishing House, 2006). Currently she is working on the improvement of her doctoral dissertation and rewriting it in Chinese, so as to make it more accessible to Chinese readers. Compared with the published dissertation, the book in process is going to be enlarged in size, covering more stories by Singer, and more themes of Kabbalah. Besides, she hopes to make some comparison between notions of Kabbalah and those of traditional Chinese philosophies, such as Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, thus promotes the mutual understanding of both Jewish and Chinese culture. Meanwhile, she is also working on the translation of another 25 short stories by Isaac Singer into Chinese. The new collection will be published in 2017.

Yuval Sahar is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Jewish History, Tel Aviv University. During the years 2008-2014 was, also, the Head of the Interdisciplinary Program in Humanities, Tel-Aviv University. His general field of interest is Eretz Israel in the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods. Special issues including: Josephus’ Geography of Eretz Israel and its relation to Talmudic traditions and Hellenistic and Roman literature; The concept and history of Eretz Israel as halakhic term and 'map', from the Hasmonean period to the 7^th century; The relationship between Jews and Samaritans, especially as reflected through the Talmudic lens; the role of Christianity in the world of Palestinian Jewry in antiquity. Main publications: Josephus Geographicus: The Classical Context of Geography in Josephus, Mohr Siebeck (Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism, 98), Tübingen 2004; B.Isaac, Y.Shahar (eds.), Judaea-Palaestina, Babylon and Rome: Jews in Antiquity, Mohr Siebeck (Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism, 147), Tübingen 2012; Y.Shahar (ed.; Co-eds.: A.Oppenheimer, R.Mustigman), Israel and the Diaspora in the time of the Second Temple and the Mishnah, Aryeh Kasher Memorial Volume (Te'uda XXV, the Chaim Rosenberg School of Jewish Studies Research Series), Tel Aviv University 2012 (Heb.) The current project re-explores the period between the great Jewish revolts against Rome and dealing with the destruction of the Temple all the way to the next catastrophe.

Ville Mäkipelto is a doctoral student at the Faculty of Theology in University of Helsinki. He is doing his doctoral research as part of the research team 'Literary Criticism in the Light of Documented Evidence'. The research team is part of the 'Changes in Sacred Texts and Traditions' -Centre of Excellence funded by the Academy of Finland. Mäkipelto's research focuses on the textual history of the book of Joshua. His aim is to integrate textual evidence from variant versions (e.g. MT, LXX, Qumran) in the discussion concerning the compositional history of the book. In this way, he also contributes to the methodological discussion concerning the relationship of textual and literary/redaction criticism. In addition, he works under the leadership of Dr. Tuukka Kauhanen in a team preparing the critical Septuagint edition of 2 Samuel to the Göttingen series. Mäkipelto has actively presented his research in various international meetings. Thus far, he has published only in Finnish but his main research is planned to be published in an English monograph and articles. Mäkipelto is also an active writer for the www.cstt.fi -blog.  During his stay in Oxford, Mäkipelto will focus especially on the Greek manuscipts and revisions of LXX Joshua in order to determine the earliest Old Greek reading of Josh 24. He wishes to network with scholars acquainted with text-critical work. In addition, working in OCHJS offers the possibility to situate his research in the larger framework of Hebrew and Jewish studies.