Executive Committee
Eugene M. Avrutin is Assistant Professor of Modern European Jewish history and Tobor Family Scholar in the Program of Jewish Culture and Society. His recently completed book manuscript, Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press. Avrutin has published articles on documentation practices; the concept of race; and religious toleration and neighborly coexistence in the East European borderlands. Together with Harriet Murav (Professor of Slavic Literatures at the University of Illinois) and Petersburg Judaica (a Jewish Studies institute affiliated with the European University in St. Petersburg), he edited Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky’s Ethnographic Expeditions (Brandeis University Press, 2009). He is also editing (with Robert H. Greene, Professor of Russian History at the University of Montana) a critical edition of the memoirs of the educator and feminist Anna Vygodskaia. Focusing on the Baltic provinces, Avrutin has recently begun a long-term research project on everyday 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 Writers has been published in 2009 by the University of North Carolina Press. 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. She is currently editing a History of American Women's Writing for Cambridge University Press.
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.
Rachel S. Harris is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Jewish Studies at the University of Illinois. Previously she was Assistant Professor of Hebrew Literature and Language at the University at Albany (SUNY). Her research interests include the role of suicide in Israeli literature on which she wrote her doctorate at the University of Oxford. Among her most recent scholarly endeavours is a new project on contemporary literary journals in Tel Aviv. With Anna P. Ronell (Brandeis) she is co-guest editing an interdisciplinary special issue of the Journal of Jewish Identities on “Russian-Jewish Immigrant Identity Post-1978”. Together with Ranen Omer-Sherman she is working on a scholarly reader about representations of war in Israeli culture since 1978.
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 theProgram in Jewish Culture and Society at Illinois. Her first book, Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation appeared in 2007.
Her current project, 
"Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory," is forthcoming from Routledge. 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 Camera Austria, among other venues. For the 2009-2010 academic year she will be a fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
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 (forthcoming from 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 the confluences and conjunctions of 1753 especially as they related to British anxieties about empire in the eighteenth century. "Seeing Gypsies and Jews in Eighteenth-Century Britain," an article drawn from the new book, will appear in Cultural and Social History in June of 2010.
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, he taught at Stanford and the University of California at Davis. He has published 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 has recently been published by Fordham University Press. "He is currently translating a late work of Moses Mendelssohn (Morning Hours) for the University of Illinois Press and beginning work on a book-length study of the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick (tentatively titled: "Philip K. Dick: Revelation and Apocalypse in America").
Michael Rothberg is Professor of English and Conrad Humanities Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is also Director of the new Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies Initiative. Affiliated with the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, 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 work has published in such journals as American Literary History, Critical Inquiry, Cultural Critique, History and Memory, New German Critique, and PMLA, and has been translated into French, German, and Hungarian. His latest book is Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009), published by Stanford University Press in their “Cultural Memory in the Present” series. 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).