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Public Lectures Autumn 2011

Lectures

Speaker Profiles

(Note: Speaker profiles were accurate at time of lecture series and are not kept up to date)

Geoffrey Cantor is Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at the University of Leeds and Honorary Senior Research Fellow (in the Science and Technology Studies Department) at University College London. He has previously held posts at UCLA and the Dibner Institute at MIT. Trained as a physicist, much of his early research concerned British science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. More recently, he has focused on the complex interrelations between science and religion, primarily in the nineteenth century. A past-president of the British Society for the History of Science, he delivered (with Professor John Hedley Brooke) the Gifford Lectures at Glasgow in 1995-6, and co-directed (with Professor Sally Shuttleworth) the "Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical" project. His publications include Michael Faraday: Scientist and Sandemanian (1991), Quakers, Jews, and Science (2005), Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism (2006 - which he co-edited with Marc Swetlitz), and, most recently, Religion and the Great Exhibition of 1851 (2011).

Solomon Abramovich's sister Ariela Abramovich Sef was rescued by their parents from Kaunas Ghetto. They were able to preserve some documents and retell the incredible human stories of survival in adversity. Solomon Abramovich works as an ENT surgeon at Imperial College, London.

Paolo Aranha is a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellow of the Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Studies, University of London. He is the author of the book Il Cristianesimo Latino in India nel XVI secolo (2006) and has published articles in Italian and English on the history of the Catholic missions in India during the 16th - 18th centuries. He is about to defend a doctoral thesis at the European University Institute (Florence) entitled "Malabar Rites: An Eighteenth Century controversy on the Catholic missions in South India". At the Warburg Institute he is engaged in a study on the early modern Catholic representations of Hinduism. He has also started a long term research on the repression of the Indian Christians by the Goa Inquisition during the early modern age.

David Jacobson is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at UCL and also Professor of Manufacturing Technologies at Buckinghamshire New University, with doctorates in both Materials Science (Sussex University) and Classical Archaeology (London University). He currently edits the Palestine Exploration Quarterly (PEQ). He co-organised with Nikos Kokkinos two landmark international conferences on Herodian studies: Herod and Augustus (sponsored by the IJS in 2005) and Judaea and Rome in Coins, 65 BCE-135 CE (co-sponsored by the IJS and Spink in 2010), and has numerous publications on these subjects.

Nikos Kokkinos has a D.Phil. from Oxford University, and is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at UCL. He has written numerous articles on literary, documentary and archaeological material, and his books include The Enigma of Jesus the Galilean (in Greek 1980/2007), Centuries of Darkness (co-author 1991), Antonia Augusta (1992/2002), The Herodian Dynasty (1998/2010), The World of the Herods (editor 2007), and Herod and Augustus (co-editor 2009).

Tessa Rajak is Professor of Ancient History Emeritus in the University of Reading, Senior Research Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford and a Member of the Hebrew and Jewish Studies Unit at the Oriental Institute, Oxford. She has held distinguished visiting posts at universities in Europe, Israel and the US. Among her books are Translation and Survival: The Greek Bible of the Ancient Jewish Diaspora (2009), The Jewish Dialogue with Greece and Rome (2002), and Josephus: The Historian and His Society (2nd edition 2002). She has also edited the Journal of Jewish Studies.

Cathy S. Gelbin is Senior Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Manchester. She specialises in German-Jewish culture, Holocaust Studies, gender and film. Before serving as Director of Research and Educational Programmes at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies (Sussex University, 1998-2000), she was coordinator of the Holocaust video testimony project Archiv der Erinnerung, carried out at the University of Potsdam. Recent publications include the monograph The Golem Returns: From German Romantic Literature to Global Jewish Culture (2010) and Jewish Culture in the Age of Globalization (co-ed. with Sander Gilman), a special issue of the Oxford journal European Review of History.

Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, a scholar of talmudic literature, is Associate Professor of Religious and Jewish Studies at Stanford University, where she has also served as a Director of the Taube Center for Jewish Studies for the past four years. Her first book, Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender (2000) won the Salo Baron Prize for best book in Jewish Studies and was a finalist in Jewish Scholarship for the National Jewish Book Award. She co-edited the Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature (2007), and edited the English translation of Jacob Taubes' From Cult to Culture (2010). She is currently working on a study of rabbinic politics entitled: Re-Placing the Nation: Judaism, Diaspora and Neighborhood.

Ada Rapoport-Albert is Head of the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London. She has published many studies of Hasidism, focusing on particular institutions or schools of thought as well as on particular topics (e.g. the perception of history within the movement, the position of women in Hasidism). In addition to her work on Hasidism, Professor Rapoport-Albert's interests include gender issues in the history of Judaism. She is currently completing a book entitled Female Bodies - Male Souls: Asceticism and Gender in the Jewish Mystical Tradition.

Nathan Abrams was educated at the Universities of Oxford and Birmingham. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Bangor University in Wales. His most recent publications include Jews & Sex (2008), Studying Film (2nd edition 2010) and The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema (2011).