People

Faculty || Affiliated Faculty || Visiting Faculty || Lecturers || Staff

Faculty (back to top)

Biale, DavidWebsite3238 SSH
David Biale is the Emanuel Ringelblum Professor of Jewish History and the Chair of the History Department. He has completed the Judaism volume of the Norton Anthology of World Religions (to be published in fall, 2012). His book, Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought was published by Princeton in 2010 and will appear in 2011 in Hebrew by the Hartman Institute. He is also the author of Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol Between Jews and Christians (University of California Press, 2007). Last year, Professor Biale won the UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Scholarly Achievement.
 
Janowitz, NaomiWebsite924 Sproul
Naomi Janowitz is Professor of Religious Studies. Her areas of interest are Judaism in the Greco-Roman context, Hellenistic religions, methods in the study of religions, and the psychoanalytic study of religion. Publications include: Icons of Power: Ritual Practices in Late Antiquity (Penn State Univ. Press, 2002) and Magic in the Roman World (Routledge, 2001). In 2005, she received a Distinguished Teaching Award. An article of hers about late antique Jewish attitudes towards art and idolatry appeared in the Nov 2007 History of Religions journal. Her current research is focused on the emergence of martyrdom in the ancient world.
 
Maoz, ZeevWebsite246 SSH
Zeev Maoz is Professor of Political Science. His recent book is Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel's Security and Foreign Policy (University of Michigan Press, 2006). He teaches the Arab-Israeli Conflict and International Politics of the Middle East.
 
Miller, Susan GilsonWebsite3219 SSH
Susan Gilson Miller is an Associate Professor of History and teaches courses on the History of the Jews in the Mediterranean and Muslim Worlds. Her most recent publications are The Architecture and Memory of the Minority Quarter of the Muslim Mediterranean City (Harvard University Press, 2010), and Berbers and Others, Beyond Tribe and Nation in the Maghrib (Indiana University Press, 2010). Her research focuses on Jewish communities in North Africa, historical urbanism, and the historiography of colonialism and nationalism. She has completed The History of Modern Morocco (1830-2000) for the Cambridge University Press series on countries of the Middle East and North Africa, and is beginning a new project on humanitarian relief in North Africa during World War II
 
Vidas, Moulie906 Sproul Hall
Moulie Vidas is an Assistant Professor in Religious Studies. He received a B.A. in Talmud and Jewish Philosophy from Tel Aviv University and did some graduate work at the Hebrew University before receiving a Ph.D. in late ancient religion from Princeton University in 2009. His dissertation, "Tradition and the Formation of the Talmud," examines the composition practices that formed the Babylonian Talmud and also places these practices in several conversations that took place between Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians in late ancient Mesopotamia.
 
Wolf, Diane L.Website2267 SSH
Diane L Wolf is Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Jewish Studies Program. Her recent publications include Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland (University of California Press, 2007) and Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas (Duke University Press, 2007). She teaches Contemporary American Jewish Identities and Communities. Her interests include family, gender, immigration, trauma, memory and identities, ethnography, and contemporary Jewish culture. She is currently researching contemporary Jews and their attitudes toward circumcision and is also interested in the cultural memory of the Holocaust in the US and its relationship to children of survivors.
 
Affiliates (back to top)
Arnett, CarleeWebsite413 Sproul Hall
Carlee Arnett is Associate Professor in the Department of German. Trained as a Germanic Linguist, her main areas of research are theoretical syntax, historical linguistics and second language acquisition. She has an interest in the syntax, history and instruction of Yiddish. She teaches German Jewish Intellectual Thought and is interested in Jewish cultures in the German speaking world, particularly current groups in Germany.
 
Chin, Catherine
Catherine Chin is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies. Her interests focus on early Christian social and intellectual history, ritual, literary cultures of late antiquity and the early middle ages, premodern notions of gender, sexuality, and the body. Her most recent publication is* */Grammar and Christianity in the Late Roman World/, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. She is currently working on /The Momentum of the Word: Rufinus of Aquileia and the Birth of Christian Literature/, a book-length study of translation theory and theologies of scribal practice in the late fourth and early fifth centuries.
 
Coudert, Allison908 Sproul
Allison P. Coudert currently holds the Paul and Marie Castelfranco Chair in the Religious Studies Program. Her focus of interest is on the interaction between religion and science in the West, with a special emphasis on Jewish contributions to science, and on women and gender issues. She has recently completed a book titled Religion, Magic, and Science in Early Modern Europe and America (Praeger, October, 2011). Her published books include Leibniz and the Kabbalah (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995); The Impact of the Kabbalah in the 17th Century: The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury van Helmont, 1614-1698 (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 1999). Among her recent articles are, "Laughing at Credulity and Superstition in the Long Eighteenth Century," Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times (2010) and "Probing Women and Penetrating Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe," Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Esotericism (2008).
 
Fisher, JaimeyWebsite409 Sproul Hall
Jaimey Fisher is Associate Professor of German and Director of Film Studies. He is the author of Disciplining Germany: Youth, Reeducation, and Reconstruction after the Second World War (Wayne State UP, 2007); he is also co-editor, with Peter Uwe Hohendahl, of Critical Theory: Current State and Future Prospects (Berghahn, 2001). He has published essays on German film, literature, and intellectual history in various journals, including German Quarterly, New German Critique, Genre, iris, and Zeitschrift für Germanistik, among others. He has a particular interest in cinema about the Holocaust, and has a co-edited volume, entitled Collapse of the Conventional, on post-1989 German cinema (2010).
 
Kaminer, Jenny
Jenny Kaminer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of German and Russian. She received her Ph.D. from Northwestern in Slavic Languages and Literatures. Her research interests include gender and Russian culture, especially the representation of maternity; Russian theater and drama, and humor and comedy in Russian culture. Her book manuscript is entitled The Bad Mother in Russian Culture. She has published several articles on Russian literature. She will be teaching a new course in Spring 2012 on Jews and Russian Culture (RUS 130), offered through her department and Jewish Studies.
 
Materson, LisaWebsite3223 SSH
Lisa Materson is an Associate Professor of History. She specializes in Women's history, African American history, and US political history. She is also interested in Jewish women's peace activism and the historical construction of Jewish racial identities. Her most recent book is titled For the Freedom of her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877-1932 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). She offers a seminar on Jews and racial construction in the US.
 
Schildgen, Brenda Deen811 Sproul Hall
Brenda Deen Schildgen is Professor of Comparative Literature. Her publications include Heritage or Heresy: Destruction and Preservation of Art and Architecture in Europe (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2008), the co-edited volume (with Gang Zhou and Sander Gilman) Other Renaissances (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2007), and the 1999 Choice Book Award Power and Prejudice: The Reception of the Gospel of Mark (Wayne State, 1999). Her research and teaching interests include the European Middle Ages, particularly Southern Europe, reception theory, the relationship between history and fiction, biblical hermeneutics, and interpretive theory. Schildgen recently was awarded the 2008 UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Scholarly Achievement.
 
Walker, Clarence E.Website3236 SSH
Clarence E. Walker is Professor of History and Cultural Studies. His books are: A Rock In A Weary Land The African Methodist Episcopal Church During the Civil War And Reconstruction, Deromanticizing Black History Critical Essays And Reappraisals, We Can't Go home Again: An Argument About Afrocentrism, Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten By Thomas Jefferson And Sally Hemings, and with Gregory Smithers The Preacher And The Politician: Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama and Race In America (University of Virginia Press, 2009) along with numerous articles. He has taught courses in Black American History, Comparative Slavery, The History of the Holocaust and American Negro Slavery, Race in America and Film.
 
Watenpaugh, Heghnar ZeitlianWebsite210C Art
Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh is Associate Professor of Art History. Her research interests encompass architecture and urbanism in the Islamic world, especially the Ottoman empire, Syria, and Turkey; heritage and preservation; gender and space; and spatial practice of minority and marginal groups in Islamic society. She is the author of The Image of an Ottoman City and is currently working on "The Non-Muslims' Islamic City: A French Consul, a Jewish Merchant and an Armenian Pilgrim Narrate Ottoman Aleppo." Her courses include The Islamic City as well as Arts of the Islamic Book; both cover the contribution of minority groups, including Jews, to the visual arts of the Islamic world.
 
Watenpaugh, Keith DavidWebsite902 Sproul Hall
Keith David Watenpaugh is Associate Professor of Modern Islam, Human Rights and Peace in the Religious Studies Program. He is the author of Being Modern in the Middle East (Princeton, 2006). His courses of interest include RST 1E Fundamentalism, RST 90 Human Rights, and RST 131 Genocide. He is finishing a new book on the Middle East and the evolution of the modern human rights regime. Dr. Watenpaugh will be on leave during the academic year 2008-2009 to be the Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow in International Peace and the United States Institute of Peace.
 
Visiting Faculty (back to top)
Khazzoom, Aziza
Aziza Khazzoom is Senior Lecturer of Sociology at Hebrew University and received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Khazzoom is extending her position as the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Visiting Israeli Professor for the 2012 academic year. She recently published Shifting Ethnic Boundaries and Inequality in Israel: Or, How the Polish Peddler Became a German Intellectual (Stanford University Press, 2008). She is teaching Multiple Voices of Israel (SOC 195) and Social Stratification in the US and Israel (SOC 140), offered through the Sociology department and Jewish Studies.
 
Lecturers (back to top)
Franco, Galia
Galia Franco was born and raised in Israel. She started teaching Hebrew to new adult immigrants during her service in the Israeli army. In 1996 she started teaching modern Hebrew at UC Davis. This year, Galia will be teaching beginning modern Hebrew and Intermediate modern and biblical Hebrew.
 
Kierra Crago-Schneider
Kierra Crago-Schneider is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She specializes in Modern Jewish History and Modern German History. Kierra received her first MA degree in Modern European History from UCR and a second MA in Jewish History from UCLA. Her Dissertation"'Meeting at Möhlstraße: Relations Formed Between Jews, Germans and Americans Through Their Involvement in the Postwar Economy in Munich" examines the lives of Jewish Displaced Persons (DP) living in American run Jewish only DP centers in Bavaria and their associations with their non-Jewish German neighbors and American occupation soldiers. Kierra received a Mellon Fellowship for the study of the Holocaust in American and World Culture and is a Saul Kegan Claims Conference fellow for Advanced Holocaust Studies. She will be teaching History 113, the History of Modern Israel in the spring quarter.
 
Terry, Wendy R.
Wendy R Terry has a PhD in Christian Spirituality from the Graduate Theological Union and is a Lecturer in the Religious Studies Program. She regularly teaches the department's lower division survey courses, the upper division methods course required of majors and minors, as well as biblical studies courses. Her research foci include Christian Spirituality, History of Christianity, medieval mysticism, and the application of tools from Linguistics to the study of historical texts.
 
Staff (back to top)

Cara Chiaraluce
Graduate Coordinator