The OCHJS hosts a number of visiting academics each year through the following 3 status options.
Visiting Fellows
Visiting Fellowships of the Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies are available for postdoctoral researchers and senior scholars through our Oxford Seminars in Advanced Jewish Studies programme, which hosts four streams of Visiting Fellowships: OCHJS-IHBMR Visiting Fellowships in Manuscript Studies, OSRJL Visiting Fellowships in Rare Jewish Languages, Salo and Jeannette Baron Visiting Fellowships in Jewish History and Yishai Shahar Visiting Fellowships in Jewish Art History. Visiting Fellows are invited to participate in and contribute to the OCHJS’s academic activities (all of which are conducted in English), given shared office space at the Clarendon Institute, issued individual University Cards and receive honoraria. They may be invited to present a paper relating to their research should a suitable opportunity arise. Calls for applications are posted each academic year; to see if any are currently open, click the button below.
Current Visiting Fellows
Dr Amit Levy
Amit Levy is a research fellow in the Department of Israel Studies at the University of Haifa. His expertise lies in the late modern history of knowledge and migration and their influence on cross-cultural encounters, exploring the intersections of Jewish, Middle Eastern, and European histories. His other research interests include German-Jewish visual history, and government-academia relations.
Amit obtained his PhD from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2021, focusing on the history of Zionist Oriental Studies as migrating knowledge. His thesis was recognized with the MEISAI and Frieden best dissertation awards. Currently, he is preparing an updated book adaptation of his thesis, which is scheduled for publication by Brandeis University Press in 2024.
Amit has contributed to international peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes, publishing several papers. In addition to his research work, he holds the position of managing editor at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center’s Naharaim: Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History.
At the OCHJS, Amit will conduct research for his current project, which revolves around Jewish-Arab-British encounters of knowledge in Mandatory Jerusalem.
Dr Ilaria Briata
Ilaria Briata, PhD, is a scholar in Jewish literary and intellectual history specialising in early modern musar literature and rabbinic ethics. She received her PhD from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in 2015, defending a dissertation on the late antique etiquette tractates Derekh Erets Rabbah and Zuta, published as Due trattati rabbinici di galateo [Brescia: Paideia, 2017]). She is currently a post-doctoral research associate at the Institute for Jewish Philosophy and Religion at the University of Hamburg, where she has been working on her second book, exploring 18-century Ottoman musar (i.e. spiritual guidance) literature as a Jewish contribution to the history of psychology.
Some of her latest papers include “Repentance through Fear: Cosmic and Body Horror in Shevet Musar,” EJJS 14,2 (2020): 264–284; “A Preliminary Study of the History of Sephardic Theatre in Italy,” Zutot 18 (2021): 56–79; “Demons and Scatology: Cursed Toilets and Haunted Baths in Late Antique Judaism,” in Demons in Early Judaism and Christianity, ed. by Hector M. Patmore and Josef Lössl (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2022): 256–272.
At the OCHJS, she will develop a project on Jewish Horror and literary performances of fear in early modern Hebrew writings, focusing on poetry on death, the macabre, and the otherworld composed by 16th-century Italian-Sephardic authors.
Ms Dagmara Budzioch
Dagmara Budzioch completed her doctoral studies in 2013 based on en cotutelle agreement between The Jagiellonian University in Kraków and The École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE, Sorbonne) in Paris. In 2014, her doctoral dissertation won the first prize in the category of doctoral dissertations in the 6th edition of The Majer Bałaban Competition organized by the E. Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Starting in 2014, Dagmara Budzioch realized several postdoctoral projects at The Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, The Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales – Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Madrid (as a part of the project “Jewish Cultures across Mediterranean Europe”), and at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Over the last decade, she also received many scholarships and research grants funded, among others, by the French Government (Bourse du Government Français – BGF), the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), and the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe; her last research project was funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation. Her research interests focus on the broadly understood history of the Jewish book, including the mutual influence between handwritten and printed books, Jewish book art (particularly of decorated Esther scrolls and manuscripts from the 18th century), and the history of Hebrew script. Results of her investigation are gathered in the book devoted to the collection of decorated Esther scrolls held at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and discussing them within the context of the production of other manuscripts of this genre in the 17th and 18th centuries. In 2020, the book won the first prize in the Professors Józef Gierowski and Chone Shmeruk competition for the best book on the history and culture of Polish Jewry. Some other aspects of the Jewish book history, production, and art, she discussed in the articles (two forthcoming articles discuss the life and oeuvre of Paola ben Abraham Anav, the female scribe from the Middle Ages, and color insertions in Hebrew incunables), and presented at many international conferences and congresses (lastly at the 12th Congress of the European Association for Jewish Studies in Frankfurt Main). She also collaborated in the catalog of decorated Esther scrolls from the collection of the Klau Library, Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, and two private collections. In addition, she taught Hebrew calligraphy during numerous workshops.
Dr Ilana Wartenberg
Dr Ilana Wartenberg studied mathematics (B.Sc., M.Sc.), linguistics (M.A.), and history and philosophy of science (Ph.D.), at Tel Aviv University and at Université Paris 7. She specialized in medieval Hebrew science and Hebrew as a language of science, focusing on mathematics, astronomy and the reckoning of the Jewish and other calendars. She held postdoctoral positions at UCL and at the University of Bern, and she is currently a senior researcher and the head of Italia Judaica at the Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Centre at Tel Aviv University. She is researching Hebrew scientific treatises and glossaries from the late Middle Ages and the early modern period in peninsular Italy and in Sicily. Of particular interest to her is the wide-spread presence of vernacular and Latin terminology in astronomical and mathematical in Hebrew texts. Her first book The Epistle of the Number by Ibn al-Aḥdab; the transmission of Arabic mathematics to Hebrew circles in medieval Sicily, was published by Gorgias Press in 2015. She is completing her second book on Jacob bar Samson’s treatise on the Jewish calendar from twelfth-century Northern France.
Visiting Scholars
Visiting Scholars—senior scholars accepted by application to the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies who come to Oxford to work on their current, independent research projects—are advised on how to apply for a Bodleian Readers Card to access the Bodleian Libraries as well as given access to shared office space in the Clarendon Institute. Visiting Scholars are invited and encouraged to attend and participate in the academic activities of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, all of which are conducted in English. They may be invited to present a paper relating to their research should a suitable opportunity arise.
Individuals wishing to be academic visitors at the University of Oxford and obtain a University Card may apply to be affiliated with the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (AMES). For information, please email Trudi Pinkerton at trudi.pinkerton@ames.ox.ac.uk.
Current Visiting Scholars
Professor Joanna Dyduch
Joanna Dyduch is Associate Professor at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, as well as a political scientist and international relations scholar based at the Institute of Middle and Far East, where she chairs the Department of Israel.
Her research interests focus on intersections between international relations and public policies. She specialises in Israel Studies, with a particular focus on Israel’s foreign policy and its relations with Europe. Most recently, she has been working on a research project devoted to the impact of history on contemporary political international relations, examining a case study of Israel’s relations with Poland in the wider context of Polish-Jewish relations, their historical legacy and heritage.
Joanna’s papers have been published in international journals (e.g., Journal of European Integration, Israel Studies Review, Energy Policy, Religions). She has also contributed to edited volumes published by Routledge, Brill and Palgrave. Most recently, she was a Visiting Scholar at Maryland University, USA (2022); University of Potsdam, Germany (2020); Matej Bel University in Banska Bystrica, Slovakia (2019); University of Vienna, Austria (2017); and a research fellow of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) (2018).
From 2019-2022, she served as the President of the European Association for Israeli Studies (now she serves as an Executive Board Member) and, since 2021, she has been a Member of the Board Directors of the Association of Israel Studies, based in the US.
At the OCHJS, she will be working on a project titled: ‘Trajectories of Polish–Israeli Relations: from Partnership to Crisis (2004-2020). Between Europeanisation and Atlanticism in the Context of Ideological Changes and a Policy-Making Styles Re-Evaluation’, financed by NAWA as part of the Bekker Scholarship Programme.
Professor Oystein LaBianca
Oystein S. LaBianca (Ph.D. Anthropology, Brandeis 1987) is a senior research professor of anthropology in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and associate director of the Institute of Archaeology at Andrews University in the USA. He is the author, co-author, or co-editor of over twenty books dealing with the archaeology of Jordan, including the 14-volume Hesban Final Publication Series. He is a founding co-director of the Madaba Plains Project (MPP), currently excavating in Jordan at Tall Hisban, Tall al-Umayri, and Tall Jalul, and senior director of the Hesban Cultural Heritage Project, a community archaeology initiative focused on engaging the local community in the care, protection and presentation of this important biblical, classical and Islamic site. He is a former member of the board of trustees and former vice-president the American Society of Research (ASOR) in Alexandria, VA, and also a trustee of the American Center of Research (ACOR) in Amman, Jordan. For six years he was chair of ASOR’s Committee on Archaeological Policy and Research (CAP). He has also represented Middle East anthropology and archaeology on the steering committee of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association. He has been a visiting scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, and at the Center for International Development (later UNIFOB Global) at the University of Bergen in Norway. His research in Jordan has received research grants from, among others, the National Geographic Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Department of State’s Ambassador’s Fund for Cultural Heritage Preservation, and the Research Council of Norway. Also see: https://explorer-directory.nationalgeographic.org/oystein-s-labianca
Dr Emily Rose
Emily M. Rose, MBA, PhD, is a scholar of Medieval and Early Modern Europe whose work has been hailed as ‘a model of thoroughgoing historical scholarship presented to a general audience and should be studied by scholars who wish to bring the humanities to the public square’.
A graduate of Oxford with an Honours degree in Modern History, she has been a Research Associate at the Department of History, Harvard University for the past two years and, before that, taught at five universities. Her project at OCHJS will examine ‘Expulsion, “Re-admission”, Celebration: Jews of England and the Construction of a National Identity’.
Rose’s first book, The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe (Oxford University Press, 2015), was named one of the ‘Ten Best History Books of the Year’ by the Sunday Times of London and described by the Wall Street Journal as ‘a landmark of historical research’. The American Historical Review called it ‘a significant achievement’ and the AJS Review described it as ‘a truly excellent book. It deserves to be read and studied by scholars in many if not all fields of medieval studies’. It won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Association and was awarded the 2017 Albert C. Outler Prize of the American Society for Church History for the best ecumenical church history monograph.
Rose also has published on Christian-Jewish relations in late antiquity, as well as on European politics and finance in the early modern world. Rose’s articles have appeared in Parliamentary History, the Huntington Library Quarterly and the Virginia Magazine of History, and are forthcoming in Maine History and Studies in the Age of Chaucer. Her essay on ‘Blood Libel, Crusades and Popular Violence’ has just appeared in The Cambridge Companion to the History of Antisemitism (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Professor Lawrence Geraty
Lawrence T. Geraty (PhD Harvard 1972) is President Emeritus of La Sierra University (Riverside, California, 1993-2007) and former President of ASOR (=the American Schools of Oriental Research, 2001-2004). During his doctoral studies he received a Fulbright Fellowship to work on his dissertation in Jerusalem while excavating at Gezer, Khirbet el-Kom, French Hill (Jerusalem), and Hisban starting in 1968. From 1972 to 1985, he taught archaeology and Hebrew Bible at Andrews University Seminary where he founded its Institute of Archaeology and the Horn Archaeological Museum and directed its Jordanian field excavation at Tall Hisban from 1973 to 1978, and served as Senior Project Director of the Madaba Plains Project at Tall Umayri and Tall Jalul (from 1983 through 2000) for which he was honored by ASOR with the MacAllister Field Archaeology Award.. At various times he has served on the editorial boards of the Biblical Archaeologist/Near Eastern Archaeology and the Biblical Archaeology Review. For many years he served as a trustee of ACOR in Amman and as Vice President from 1982 to 2002. From 1985 to 1993 he served as President of Atlantic Union College (South Lancaster, Massachusetts) and as President of the Midwest Region of the Society of Biblical Literature (1998-1990). His research interests have been in Syro-Palestinian archaeology (especially Jordan), Semitic palaeography, ancient Near Eastern history, and Hebrew Bible. He has edited some ten books, contributed to some thirty, and authored some sixty articles in scholarly journals and some hundred in popular magazines. Both in Massachusetts and California he has been very active in his communities, serving on hospital and educational boards, symphony orchestra boards, United Ways, Chambers of Commerce, Community Foundations, World Affairs Councils, museum boards, a TV station board, California Post-Secondary Education Commission, Southern California’s Metropolitan Water District’s Blue Ribbon Committee, and various governmental and philanthropic organizations. For his service he has been recognized for several awards, including Riverside’s “Citizen of the Year.” In retirement, he continues part time to assist La Sierra University as Director of its Foundation and Associate Director of its Center for Near Eastern Archaeology. He has been married to Gillian Keough since 1962 and they have two children, Julie Piller, a manager of a social service agency in Boulder, Colorado, and Brent Geraty, the general counsel for the University of Redlands in Redlands, California. Between them, they have five grandchildren, Emma, Eli, Eden, Grace, and Eros.
Dr Mei-Tal Nadler
Mei-Tal Nadler is a researcher and lecturer in the Department of Literature, Language and the Arts at the Open University of Israel, and a Research Fellow at Heksherim Institute for Jewish and Israeli Literature and Culture at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Hebrew Literature at Ben-Gurion University. Her projects and publications focus on the intersection of ideology, nationalism, ethics, and space in Israeli literature as part of the Israeli public discourse. Most recently, she has been working on the research project “Local Poetics of Israeli Fiction” in conjunction with Heksherim Institute and the University of Cambridge, which offers a new historiography of post-statehood Israeli authors. She is also an associate editor of two forthcoming volumes dedicated to this project in Journal of Modern Jewish Studies. Since 2021, Dr Nadler has been a research member of the “Thinking Group: A Partnership-Based Jewish-Palestinian Peace” at the Van Leer Institute and Minerva Center for Human Rights. Previously she served as a Research Fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute in the program for “Human Rights and Judaism”.
Dr Nadler is a co-author of the innovative 3-Volume series The History of Hebrew Literature (2021, The OUI Press) which outlines the history of Hebrew literature from the mid-eighteenth century to the eve of the establishment of the State of Israel. Her first poetry book, Exercises in Electricity (2014, Yedioth Press), won the “Teva prize” and the “Goldberg Prize” for Literature. Her poems have been translated into multiple languages. In 2008 she received the Israeli Minister of Culture award for Young Poets, and in 2015 she was nominated for the American Pushcart Prize in the World Poetry category.
At the OCHJS, she will be working on a project entitled: “1948 and the Archive of Tomorrow: Autobiographical Novels in the Post-Oslo Era”.
Professor Oded Israeli
Oded Yisraeli is a professor in The Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. His main research area is medieval and early modern kabbalah, particularly its exegetical and Midrashic aspects. His first book, following his dissertation at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is ‘The Interpretation of Secrets and Secrets of Interpretation: Midrashic and Hermeneutic Strategies in Sabba de-Mishpatim of the Zohar‘ (Cherub Press, 2005). His second book is ‘Temple Portals: Studies in Aggadah and Midrash in the Zohar‘ (Magness Press 2013 [Hebrew Edition]; De Gruyter 2016 [English Edition]), in which he examines the Zohar as a late strata of the Midrashic literature. His recent book is ‘R. Moses b. Nachman: An Intellectual Biography’ (Magnes Press 2021), in which he offers a new – historical-biographical – perspective for understanding Nahmanides’ religious and intellectual world. This book won the Bartal Prize for historical research and Matanel Prize for the best book on Jewish thought 2020-2022 (by the World Union of Jewish Studies).
Currently, Prof. Yisraeli’s research addresses the history of Nahmanides’ Kabbalah and Its Reception in the 13th-14th Centuries, along with editing of a new critical edition of Nahmanides’ Exegetical-Philosophical Writings. For these two projects, he has won grants from the Israel science foundation (2018; 2022). During his time as a Visiting Scholar at the OCHJS, he plans to promote these projects as well as to initiate and work on a print edition of the commentary of R. Moses Isserles on the Zohar, which is the earliest Ashkenazi commentary on the Zohar. This important kabbalistic work has not been published in print; its two only manuscripts are in the Oxford Bodleian Library.
Professor Zohar Maor
Dr. Zohar Maor is a senior lecturer in the department of history, Bar-Ilan University (Israel).
His Research fields are: Cultural and Intellectual History of Modern Central Europe, Secularization and Neo-religiosity, Jewish-German Intellectuals: Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig; Modern religions from an Inter-religious prespective
Among his recent publications are “Rosenzweig’s Ideal of Community: Blood, Prayer and Redemption,” Jewish Studies Quarterly (2021); Shmuel Z. Kahana, Burning Scrolls and Ascending Letters: Unpublished Writings on the Shoah (editor), Bar Ilan University Press, 2018 (Hebrew); and “Kohn’s Buber, Buber’s Kohn: Hans Kohn’s Biography of Martin Buber Revisited”, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book (2018).
His manuscript “Beyond Religion and Secularity: Post-Secular Theology Between the World Wars in Germany”, is under contract with SUNY Press.
Dr. Maor is co-founders of “International Network of Inter-religious research and Education”, (est. 2017) including scholars from fifteen universities worldwide.
Dr Marci Freedman
Marci Freedman completed her PhD at the University of Manchester (2016), and held the SavaRanisavljevic Postdoctoral Fellowship at NorthwesternUniversity (2018-2020). A scholar oftextual and intellectual history with interests in Jewish travel narratives, pilgrimage, and theexchange of ideas between cultures, she is the author of the forthcomingAn Introduction to theJewish Diaspora in the Global Middle Ages. Other publications include “Teaching Benjamin ofTudela’s Book of Travels in the Jewish Middle Ages” (2022) and “So Many Tall Tales:Constantijn L’Empereur’s Polemical Reading of Benjamin of Tudela’s Book of Travels” (2020).In addition to her current project, “Mapping Jewish Pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the MiddleAges”, she ispreparing a monograph based on her doctoral researchon the transmission andreception of Benjamin of Tudela’sBook of Travels.
Junior Visiting Scholars
Individuals advanced in their doctoral or postdoctoral work may apply for Junior Visiting Scholar status at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies to carry out their own independent research. Junior Visiting Scholars are invited to attend and participate in the events and activities of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (all of which are conducted in English) and will be advised as to how they may apply for a Bodleian Readers Card to access the Bodleian Library system. However, Junior Visiting Scholars are not permitted to participate in activities of the University of Oxford more broadly; those wishing to do so must apply for visiting student status separately through the University and at a cost.