Executive Committee
Eugene M. Avrutin is the Tobor Family Assistant Professor of modern European Jewish history. His recently completed book, A Legible People: Identification Politics, the Imperial Russian State, and the Jews, analyzes the political tensions and administrative dilemmas of identifying Jews in the Russian empire. He has published on documentation practices; the concept of race in imperial Russia; and religious toleration and co-existence. Together with Harriet Murav, he is editing an English-language edition of photographs from S. An-sky’s ethnographic expedition. And together with Robert H. Greene (professor of Russian history at the University of Montana), he is editing and translating the memoirs of the educator and feminist Anna Vygodskaia. Avrutin has begun research on Jewish neighborly relations in nineteenth-century Russia.
Dale M. Bauer has been a Professor of English at Illinois since 2004. She has also taught at the University of Kentucky, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Miami University of Ohio, College of the Holy Cross, and Franklin & Marshall College. In addition to writing on feminist and critical pedagogy, she has also published Feminist Dialogics, Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics, and edited collections on Bakhtin and feminism, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-paper,” and 19th-century American women’s writing. Her new book, Sex Expression and American Women’s Writing, will be published by the University of North Carolina Press in January 2009. In this analysis of how women writers created a rhetoric of sexuality, she moves from sentimental fictions like The Morgesons and The Silent Partner to the huge bestsellers by Jewish-American writer Fannie Hurst. This new rhetoric of sexuality enabled critical conversations about who had sex, when in life they had it, and how it signified.
Matti Bunzl is Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Director of the Program in Jewish Culture and Society. His research interests include the anthropology of Jews and Judaism, European-Jewish history and culture, the history of anthropology, and the anthropology of art. He is the author of Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna (University of California Press, 2004) and Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe (Prickly Paradigm Press/University of Chicago Press, 2007). In addition, he has co-edited Altering States: Ethnographies of Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (University of Michigan Press, 2000), Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire (University of Michigan Press, 2003), and Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Duke University Press, 2005). Bunzl is the co-editor of the book series “Jewish Cultures of the World” (Rutgers University Press) and the co-chair of the Council for the Anthropology of Jews and Judaism.
Virginia R. Dominguez is Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, immediate past Editor of the American Ethnologist, and forthcoming President of the American Anthropological Association. She is also Co-founder and now Consulting Director of the International Forum for U.S.Studies which moved with her to the University of Illinois in 2007. Author, coauthor, or editor of 8 books and dozens of articles many of 
them published outside the United States – including People as Subject, People as Object: Selfhood and Peoplehood in Contemporary Israel (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana (Rutgers University Press, 1986), and From Beijing to Port Moresby: The Politics of National Identity in Cultural Policies (Gordon and Breach, 1998) – she is best known for theorizing and analyzing cultural politics, public discourse, assertions of sameness and the reproduction of otherness (both in general and with particular attention to Jewishness, Israeli society, and whiteness). She is also the recipient of major fellowships and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Foundation, the Harvard University Society of Fellows, the National Science Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. Her most recent recognition for teaching was the 2006 Outstanding Mentor Award (Social Sciences) presented to her by the University of Iowa Graduate College. Professor Dominguez, a native of Cuba, earned her Ph.D. at Yale University in 1979 in Social Anthropology, and taught at Duke University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of California at Santa Cruz, Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, and the University of Iowa prior to moving to Illinois in 2007. Her special interest in Israel and Israeli Jewish society date back to her first visit in December 1979 and, prior to that, her times on the Lebanese-Israeli border in the summers of 1970 and 1971 when her parents lived in Beirut.
Dara E. Goldman is an Associate Professor of Spanish, specializing in 19th, 20th, and 21st century Hispanic Caribbean and
Latin American literatures and cultures, gender studies and cultural studies. She is the author of Out of Bounds: Islands and the Demarcation of Identity in the Hispanic Caribbean (Bucknell Univ. Press, 2008) and is currently completing a manuscript of Latina lesbian narratives. She has conducted research on Jewish communities in Cuba and the Dominican Republic and has written about the role of Jewishness in contemporary Caribbean novels of self-discovery. In addition to the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, Professor Goldman also holds appointments as Affiliate Faculty in the Center for Global Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Latina/Latino Studies and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretative Theory.
Brett Ashley Kaplan received her Ph.D. from the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley and is an Associate Professor in the Program in Comparative and World Literature and the Program in Jewish Culture and Society at Illinois. Her first book, Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation came out in 2007. She has published articles in Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, International Studies in Philosophy, Philip Roth Studies, Comparative Literature, Images: Journal of Jewish Art and Culture, and CameraAustria, among other venues. Her current book project is entitled “Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory.”
Harriet Murav is the Head of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures as well as
a Professor of Comparative Literature. She is the author of Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky's Novels & the Poetics of Cultural Critique (Stanford University Press, 1992), Russia's Legal Fictions (University of Michigan Press, 1998; Winner, MLA 1999 Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures), and Identity Theft: The Jew in Imperial Russia and the Case of Avraam Uri Kovner (Stanford University Press, 2003). She received a Guggenheim in 2006-07 for her ongoing project “Music on a Speeding Train: Soviet Yiddish and Russian- Jewish Literature of the Twentieth Century,” which focuses on Russian and Yiddish literary works from the 20s through the turn of the 21st century, with particular emphasis on the themes of the body, language, translation, mourning, and memory in Isaac Babel, Dovid Bergelson, Perets Markish, Rivke Rubin, Vasilii Grossman, Felix Roziner, Fridrikh Gorenshtein, Dina Rubina, Alexandr Melikhov, and other writers. Murav is currently co-editing “Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky's Ethnographic Expedition” with Eugene Avrutin and St. Petersburg Judaica (under contract with Brandeis University Press). In addition, she is the editor of a book series exploring new approaches to Russian-Jewish Studies, "Borderlines: Russian and East-European Jewish Studies," at Academic Studies Press.
Wayne Pitard is a Professor in the Department of Religion. His primary areas of research are the history of ancient Syria and its political and cultural relationship with Israel, concepts of death and afterlife in ancient Syria-Palestine, and the production of a new image-based, digital edition of the ancient Canaanite texts from the city of Ugarit, Syria, entitled the Ugaritic Tablets Digital Edition. He teaches courses on the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), Archaeology and the Bible, and the religions and cultures of the ancient Near East. He recently completed a commentary on part of the Ugaritic Baal Cycle.
Dana Rabin is an Associate Professor in the Department of History. She specializes in the history of
eighteenth-century Britain with an emphasis on crime, law, gender, and race. Her first book, Identity, Crime, and Legal Responsibility in Eighteenth-Century England, is a study of the language of mental states in the English courtroom. The book sets legal developments within a cultural context to reveal the subtle relationships between emotion, responsibility, gender, and citizenship in the eighteenth century. Her current project explores British anxieties about empire in the eighteenth century. These "imperial disruptions" coalesced around perceived differences and definitions of race, ethnicity, class, religion, gender, age, and sexuality. Her article, "The Jew Bill of 1753: Masculinity, Virility, and the Nation, appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies. Later this year "The Sorceress, the Servant, and the Stays: Sexuality and Race in Eighteenth-Century Britain " will appear in Moving Subjects: Gender, Intimacy and Mobility in an Age of Empire edited by Antoinette Burton and Tony Ballantyne from University of Illinois Press. Most recently she completed "Seeing Gypsies and Jews in Eighteenth-Century Britain" for Cultural and Social History.
Bruce Rosenstock is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion and Associate Director of the Program in Jewish Culture and Society. He received his Ph.D. in Classics from Princeton and, prior to coming to Illinois six years ago, he taught at Stanford and the University of California at Davis. He has published numerous articles on ancient philosophy and also on the Hebrew Bible, Jewish-Christian relations in fifteenth-century Spain, Sabbatianism, and the modern philosophers Hannah Arendt and Stanley Cavell. His first book is New Men: Conversos, Theology, and Society in Fifteenth-century Castile (2002, University of London). A second book titled Philosophy and the Jewish Question: Mendelssohn, Rosenzweig, and Beyond is forthcoming with Fordham University Press. His current research deals with the philosophical and literary legacy of Henri Bergson, from Rosenzweig and Benjamin to Gilles Deleuze and Philip K. Dick.
Michael Rothberg is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. Affiliated with the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Programs in Comparative Literature and Jewish Culture and Society, Rothberg works in the fields of critical theory and cultural studies, Holocaust studies, postcolonial studies, and contemporary literatures. His new book is Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, forthcoming from Stanford University Press. Chapters from that book have appeared in Critical Inquiry, PMLA, and The Yale Journal of Criticism. He is also the author of Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000), and has co-edited The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (2003) and Cary Nelson and the Struggle for the University: Poetry, Politics, and the Profession (2009). He is the founding editor of the online public forum Kritik (http://unitcrit.blogspot.com).