University of Michigan, PhD '23

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Latin America; Gender and Sexuality; Early Modern Europe; Jewish History

BIOGRAPHY

Shai Zamir is a Collegiate Assistant Professor and Fellow at the Harper-Schmidt Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. His teaching and research focus on early modern European, Iberian, and Jewish histories, with a particular emphasis on family and kinship structures, Jewish-Christian relations, conversion, and the Inquisition.

He is currently working on his first monograph, provisionally titled Intimate Enemies and Absent Friends: Alternative Kinship in the Early Modern Iberian World. This book explores the practices of friendship across various regions of the Spanish Empire, particularly in the context of Atlantic travel, migration, and among Jews and New Christians in Iberia and its diaspora. He is also completing three essay-length projects on Sephardi masculinity, travel and exchange among Jews in the early modern period, and a study of a 17th-century Portuguese New Christian who was condemned by the Inquisition in Lima, Peru, before reinventing himself as a charismatic friar in Andalusia, Spain (forthcoming, Journal of Early Modern History, 2025).

Zamir holds a PhD in History from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and spent a year as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University. He also studied Talmud at the Hadar Institute in New York. His research has been supported by institutions such as the American Historical Association, Casa de Velázquez in Madrid, and the Center for Jewish History in New York. His work has been published in Colonial Latin American Review and the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

• Debating Friendship in Seventeenth-Century Lima, 1678–1681.” Colonial Latin American Review 32.3 (2023): 414–38.
• “New Christian Friendships and Spaces of Sociability in the Early Modern Spanish City.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 24.3 (2023): 321–37.

TEACHING

University of Chicago

• History of European Civilization I (Autumn '24)
• History of European Civilization II (Winter '25)
• History of European Civilization III (Spring '25)

Past Courses

Northwestern University

• The Formation of the Sephardi Diaspora
• Iberian Inquisitions

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

• Introduction to Colonial Latin American History