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Michal Shapira
Affiliated Visiting Scholar (Spring 2025)
Michal Shapira, who earned her Ph.D. in history and gender studies from Rutgers University, is a professor of history at Tel Aviv University. Her research addresses the legacies of World War Two and the history of psychology in Britain, Europe, and beyond. She focuses on total war, gender, and the development of expert culture in the twentieth century. She is the author of The War Inside: Psychoanalysis, Total War, and the Making of the Democratic Self in Postwar Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2013), a finalist for the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize and the Gradiva Book Award of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. Her second book, Sigmund Freud and his Patient Margarethe Csonka: A Case of Homosexuality in a Woman in Modern Vienna (Routledge, 2023), won the Radomír Luža Prize of the German Studies Association and the American Friends of the DÖW, and was chosen for the George L. Mosse Annual Lecture in the History of Gender and Sexuality.
At Rutgers, Shapira will delivery a faculty seminar, “Sigmund Freud and his Patient Margarethe Csonka: A Case of Homosexuality in a Woman in Modern Vienna,” cosponsored by the Department of Jewish Studies, the Department of History, and the Center for European Studies.
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Jenny R. Labendz
Aresty Visiting Scholar (Spring 2025)
Bildner Visiting Scholar (Fall 2024)
Jenny R. Labendz is associate professor of religious studies at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, New York. She specializes in ancient Jewish literature and religion from a comparative perspective. Her first book, Socratic Torah: Non-Jews in Rabbinic Intellectual Culture (Oxford University Press, 2013), examines attitudes and discourse about non-Jews in late antique rabbinic literature. She is currently completing a second book, Beyond Hope: Rabbinic Eschatology of Late Antiquity in Comparative Perspective, under contract with Oxford University Press.
At Rutgers, Labendz taught a mini-course, "The End of the World," in fall 2024 and, with Prof. Azzan Yadin-Israel, is organizing a rabbinics conference at Rutgers in March 2025.
