Support the ProgramJewish Studies Program at Miami University
Faculty
Vitaly Chernetsky (RUS)
Vitaly Chernetsky, Associate 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" prominently features 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. 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). Ganeva is currently working on two new projects: "Film and Other Mass-media Representations of Beauty Contests from 1900 till 1933" and "Film and Fashion among the Ruins: The Politics of Distraction in Post-War Berlin 1945-1919."
Charlotte Newman Goldy (HST)
Charlotte Newman Goldy (goldycn@MiamiOH.edu), Associate Professor/ Director of the Jewish Studies Program, 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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Hillel Gray (REL)
Hillel Gray serves as an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Religion, where he teaches courses in Jewish studies. His introductory Global Jewish Civilization fulfills a foundation course requirement for Miami's core curriculum. His upper level courses reflect his research interests, including religious law, Judaism and gender/sex, and bioethics. Feel free to ask him about his work in environmental policy or his encounters with the controversial Westboro Baptist Church.
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)
An Associate Professor of European history, Erik Jensen has taught at Miami University since 2004. His research and teaching focuses on modern Germany, particularly the Weimar Republic, European social and cultural history, and the histories of gender and sexuality. His book, Body by Weimar. Athletes, Gender and German Modernity appeared in 2010. Jensen will be teaching at Miami's Luxembourg campus until Spring 2013.
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 study of ancient and modern ideas of race — Race: Antiquity and its Legacy — and she is currently at work on a co-authored introduction to Roman Love Poetry. 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@MiamiOH.edu), Assistant Professor of French & 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 representations of the Holocaust. His recent publications include articles on French Jewish filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz's 1995 film Hate (La Haine); on Holocaust postmemory in the work of French-Jewish novelist Patrick Modiano; on the 18th-century Jewish Kantian philosopher Lazarus Bendavid; and the politicized Cold War reception of a controversial text by the Yiddish writer Yehoshue Perle, which was unearthed in 1950 as part of the clandestine "Oyneg Shabes" archive compiled and buried in the Warsaw Ghetto. He is currently working on a book with the working title Jewish Subjects: The Philosophical Politics of Jewish Subjectivity in Germany 1789-1848.
Benjamin Sutcliffe (RUS)
Ben Sutcliffe received his Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures (University of Pittsburgh, 2004). He is Associate Professor of Russian in the Department of German, Russian, East Asian Languages and works with the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies.