University of Wisconsin-Madison, PhD ' 72

BIOGRAPHY

Kathleen Neils Conzen’s research and teaching has focused on the social and political history of the nineteenth- century United States, with particular concern for themes of immigration, ethnicity, religion, western expansion, and urban development. Much of her research and writing has used the German immigrant experience to explore links between migration processes and community formation; ethnic and other identities; interrelationships among religious, ethnic, and regional cultures; and the political integration of immigrant minorities into the national community. Current projects include explorations of the role of German immigrants in the emergence of California's nineteenth-century wine industry and of German American efforts to develop and defend a theory of pluralistic democratic nationalism.

Princeton University, PhD '18

BIOGRAPHY

Emily Kern is a historian of science, with a specialty in the intellectual and cultural history of anthropology, evolution, and the life sciences. Her research and teaching focus on the relationship between the production of scientific knowledge and the production of global political power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Her current book project, The Cradle of Humanity: Science and the Making of African Origins, explores how the African continent became the “cradle of humankind” and the pre-eminent site for human evolutionary research that it is today. Until the 1950s, it was generally believed that the human species first evolved in Asia, not Africa—an idea that was deeply rooted in European intellectual traditions and continued to draw historians and scientists to the archive, the laboratory, and the Asian field well into the twentieth century. The Cradle of Humanity argues that the story of humanity’s African origin is linked necessarily with the transformation of Africa itself as an object of historical and scientific inquiry. Foregrounding the changing geography of human origins in this history also makes clear that ideas about where humankind emerged often came before explanations for how evolution functioned, and that ideas about place, race, and world history shaped how scientists thought about biological mechanisms and the human species.

She is also the editor with Alison Bashford (UNSW) and Adam Bobbette (Glasgow) of New Earth Histories: Geo-Cosmologies and the Making of the Modern World (Chicago 2023). Situated at the intersection of the history of the earth
and environmental sciences, New Earth Histories explores the significance of multiple ideas of geological time and cosmological systems for the production of global modernity. She is also beginning work on a second project exploring the contemporary construction of the racial identity of Neanderthals against the long history of the disputed place of Neanderthals in the human evolutionary lineage since the discovery of the first Neanderthal remains in 1856 and the first complete skeletal analysis in 1908.

Kern earned her BA at the University of Pennsylvania and her PhD at Princeton University in 2018. Her dissertation won the 2019 DHST dissertation prize from the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. Before coming to Chicago, she was a postdoctoral research fellow in the New Earth Histories Research Program at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

Columbia University, PhD '68

Oxford University, DPhil '69

University of Oxford, DPhil' 74
University of Oxford, DLitt' 01

BIOGRAPHY

Born London 1948. Educated High School of Glasgow and Wyggeston Grammar School, Leicester. BA, modern history, Balliol College, Oxford, 1969. Graduate studentship, Nuffield College, Oxford, 1969-73. Visiting research student, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1970-71. MA, Oxford, 1972. D Phil, modern history, Nuffield College, Oxford, 1974. D Litt, Oxford 2001. Research fellow in politics, Nuffield College, Oxford, 1973-75. College lecturer in modern history and international relations, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, 1974-76. Lecturer in modern history, Sheffield University, 1976-79. Visiting lecturer in history and international relations, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1979-80. Associate professor of history, Brandeis University, 1980-82, Professor 1982-96. Visiting fellow, Institute of Advanced Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1984-5. Dean of Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Brandeis University, 1990-92. National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 1994-5. Visiting fellow, All Souls College Oxford, 1995. President, Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and fellow, St. Cross College, 1996-2000. Professor of modern history, University of Glasgow, 2000-3. Fellow, National Humanities Center, North Carolina, 2002-3. Fellow, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, 2004-5. Guggenheim Fellow, 2007-8. Visiting fellow, Sackler Institute for Advanced Studies, Tel Aviv University, 2008. Visiting fellow, Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies, Uppsala, 2011-12. Corresponding fellow of the British Academy, 2012. Allianz Visiting Professor of Jewish History, Ludwig Maximilians Universität, Munich, 2015-16.

Stanford University, PhD '03

BIOGRAPHY

I am a historian of Jewish politics, culture, literature and thought in the modern era and in our own day. Trained in global Jewish history since the 18th century, I teach and lecture on many aspects of the modern Jewish experience, but my scholarship focuses particularly on Jewish political thought and struggle in Eastern Europe in the era of nationalism, on the unfinished history of secular Yiddish and Hebrew literary and cultural creativity, and – currently – on the forces that have shaped the deep conflicts that wrack Jewish life today in Israel and the United States.

Much of my work to date has asked how Jewish visions of cultural and political self-determination were realized, frustrated, unmade, or recast across the 20th century from Russia, Ukraine, and Poland to Palestine and Israel and what happened to Jews in the process.

In 2023, Yale University Press published a volume I co-edited with Israel Bartal, Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Volume 7 of the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, National Renaissance and International Horizons, 1880–1918, offers an annotated collection of over 900 primary sources selected to try to encompass every major trend and genre in Jewish cultural production around the globe during the 1880-1918 period. These sources, drawn from nearly twenty languages, are to accompanied by a substantial scholarly apparatus: biographies and bibliographies of each of the authors/artists and a monograph-length introduction which comprises the first attempt I know of to offer a full synthetic account of the global and regional forces, ideological, philosophical, and aesthetic commitments, and political, economic, and cultural conditions that shaped Jewish creative life in this stormy era.

My 2021 book, An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland (Harvard University Press), traces how pre-Holocaust Europe’s largest Jewish community reckoned with nationalism’s pathologies, diaspora’s fragility, Zionism’s promises, and the problem of choice under conditions of powerlessness and danger. An Unchosen People combines intellectual and social history, examining the works of Polish Jewry’s most searching Zionist and Diasporist thinkers as they confronted political irrationality, state crisis, the crisis of culture, and the limits of resistance while also recovering a lost grassroots history of critical thought and political searching among ordinary Jews as they struggled to find a viable future for themselves—in Palestine if not in Poland, individually if not communally. Supported by a Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, An Unchosen People has received the 2022 National Jewish Book Award for History from the Jewish Book Council, the 2022 Oskar Halecki Award for Polish and East Central European History from the Polish Institute for Arts and Sciences in America (PIASA), and honorable mention for the 2022 Kulczycki Book Prize in Polish Studies from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES).

My 2009 Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Harvard University Press) examines the triumph and tragedy of bids for Yiddish and Hebrew cultural renaissance amidst total war and revolution. Recovering bold artistic creativity and nation-building undone by violence and repression, Jewish Renaissance demonstrates the intensity of Jewish engagement with the liberal ethos of culture and art as vehicles of freedom, and the surprisingly deep impact of that ethos on Jewish nationalism. Jewish Renaissance received the 2010 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and has now appeared in revised Hebrew translation as Yemei ha-ma’asim: tehiyat ha-tarbut ha-yehudit be-tkufat ha-mahpekhah ha-rusit (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 2023).

Thus, where the first arc of my research asks how Jews participated in a modern dream of freedom and self-determination through art, this second arc investigates how the East European Jewish experience speaks to two other, grimmer global histories: the history of progressive social thought’s ongoing struggle to make sense of the unexpected powers of the politics of hate and fear, and the history of minority confrontations with majority pathologies they cannot change and with the imperatives of communal triage under conditions of powerlessness and danger.

Looking ahead, I am now turning my attention to the post-Holocaust and postwar Jewish world and to the conflicted Jewish life of our own time, with equal interest in the US, Israel and Palestine, and global Jewish itineraries. I am embarked on a study of the American Yiddish poet Arn Glanz-Leyeles, Jewish Americanism, and the fate of Jewish humanism after the Holocaust. I am pursuing research on East European Jewish refugee thought about fascism, religion, and reactionary politics, starting with the writings of Jewish refugees given shelter in wartime Japan.  A project provisionally entitled Israel’s Future: A History will investigate how state and military planners, intellectuals both establishment and anti-establishment, business circles, and now-dominant illiberal nationalist and ethnoreligious parties and thinktanks have approached Israel’s future (as well as the future of the occupied territories and the future – or interminable present – of the Palestinians under occupation) as an object of planning, debate, intervention, power, and critique in ethnopolitical, economic, security, political-theological, environmental, and global-catastrophic idioms.

Finally, I am embarking on a history of the Jewish present – a Jewish history for the 21st century organized not by the horizons and hopes of the 18th and 19th century (above all Enlightenment and Emancipation) but as an effort to better understand the phenomena that are recasting Jewish life today, many of them unexpectedly and in unanticipated ways. These include illiberal ethnonationalist political projects in Israel which are transforming that polity even as we speak; intense forms of religiosity that are not only centered in Israel but also now have a global reach; a multi-faceted gender revolution that now finds women at the center of organized Judaism and the question of gender equality at the heart of some of its fiercest debates; unprecedented forms of ‘post-Jewish’ hybridity in the US and Europe which suggest that much of what Jewish creativity will be and mean in coming decades will fall in an ever-widening space between complete disappearance on the one hand and all forms of organized and committed Judaism on the other; and Jewish participation in – and also new and disturbing roles and representations in – debates about global precarity, inequality, and disaster. An essay on the relations between religion and nationalism both in Judaism and in a comparative vein, written with Roger Friedland, captures some of my lines of thought about the first and second of these dimensions, as does an expanded version of the conclusion to my first book Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution, written in 2022 for the Hebrew translation thereof. 

From 2014 to 2020, I coedited the journal Jewish Social Studies with Tony Michels and Sarah Stein.

In 2021, I co-edited with Benjamin Nathans and Taro Tsurumi From Europe’s East to the Middle East: Israel’s Russian and Polish Lineages (University of Pennsylvania). 

I have also written comprehensive encyclopedia articles on the biography of Y. L. Peretz and the history of Jewish printing and publishing 

And, of course, I’ve written on St. Patrick’s Day celebrations and the construction of Irish American identity.

My work has appeared in Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, German, and Portuguese. Between 2003 and 2021, I taught Jewish history in the city where Shaul Tshernikhovski's poetry first appeared in print.

Teaching Interests

In addition to introductory courses on modern Jewish history from the 18th century to the present, I have taught specialized seminars on East European Jewry, the history of Palestine and Israel from the Mandate period to the present, Jewish religion and secularity in Eastern Europe and Israel, 20th century Jewish politics and political thought, the history of the Holocaust, Jews and the city, and the history of the idea of Jewish culture. I teach in the Jewish Civ track at the University of Chicago. I have also taught undergraduate courses on 20th century social theory; the history and sociology of nationalism; and the transatlantic history of racial and national minorityhood 1880-1939 (with Michael Hanchard). At the graduate level, I teach modern Jewish historiography and have taught specialized seminars on modern Jewish politics; Mandate Palestine; histories of nationalism; the institution of culture; and theories and histories of secularism and religion in modernity and the present.

University of California, Berkeley, PhD '71

BIOGRAPHY

Although he retired in 2007, William Sewell still teaches the occasional course. He is a founding editor of Critical Historical Studies, published by the University of Chicago Press. His most recent book is Capitalism and the Emergence of Civic Equality in Eighteenth Century France (University of Chicago Press, 2021). He has long been interested in the intersection between history and social theory, a subject he treated in Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (University of Chicago Press, 2005). In 2020, he received the inaugural Ibn Khaldun Distinguished Career Award from the Comparative and Historical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association. He is currently working on various problems in the history of capitalism. Sewell is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served as a trustee of the institute for Advanced Study (2009-14) and as president of the Social Science History Association (2011-12). Sewell is also a serious amateur photographer. He provides cover art for Critical Historical Studies and has participated in several individual and group exhibitions.

Albert Ludwigs Universität Freiburg, DPhil

BIOGRAPHY

My main field of research is twentieth-century German and European history. I have written on such topics as the German military, resistance against the Third Reich, the politics of memory, the culture of death and sacrifice, intellectuals in contemporary Germany, religion and belief, and more. By way of comparison, I have lately ventured into Japanese, American, and Soviet history. Topics I would like to write on in the future include love and friendship and the variety of intimate communities of all kinds or the way the German and European countryside radically changed in the course of the twentieth century. But for the moment, I am engaged in figuring out how to work with transnational histories of Europe and what it takes to do contemporary history in a global age.

My interest in the history and theory of human rights emerges from my concern with war, peace, and the constitution of civil society. I cofounded the Human Rights Program at the University of Chicago, now the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights. My scholarly work focuses on the question why, at certain times, human rights matter, while at others they do not. The question of rights—how people know that they have them and, equally important, that strangers have them too—informs my thinking on the matter.

Columbia University, PhD '70

Princeton University, PhD '74

BIOGRAPHY

Professor Woods focuses primarily on the history of Turkey, Iran, and Central Asia from the thirteenth to eighteenth century. He is particularly interested in aspects of the encounter of sedentary and nomadic people in those regions during that time period. He is at present working on several projects dealing with the age of Chinggis Khan and Timur (Tamerlane). He has played a central role in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies since 1980.