Visiting Scholars
The Jerome and Lorraine Aresty Visiting Scholar (Spring 2026)
Dr. Noam Sienna, a scholar of Jewish book culture in the medieval and early modern Islamic worlds, earned his Ph.D. in history and museum studies from the University of Minnesota, served as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, and is a senior fellow with the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography. He is the author of Jewish Books in North Africa: Between the Early Modern and Modern Worlds (Indiana University Press, 2025) and is currently working on a study of the first Hebrew press in the Ottoman Empire. Sienna is also a book artist, whose work brings together historical and contemporary expressions of Jewish visual and textual culture with a focus on preserving traditions of Hebrew calligraphy and Jewish letterpress printing. His artistic practice explores the intersections of diverse languages, alphabets, and texts across the wide span of Jewish history.
At Rutgers, Dr. Sienna will work collaboratively with the Rutgers Initiative for the Book, sharing his expertise in Jewish languages and print culture. He will teach a three-session virtual mini-course for the public and lead in-person printing workshops for students on the newly launched Scarlet Letterpress.
The Allen and Joan Bildner Visiting Scholar (Spring 2026)
Dr. Daniel Ross Goodman is a faculty member in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at St. John's University. A scholar of Jewish thought and theology, his research focuses on Judaism’s relationship with Christianity and other world religions and on Jewish theology’s intersections with literature and the arts. He is the author of Soloveitchik's Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America (University of Alabama Press, 2023) and Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema (Hamilton Books, 2020). He is also co-editor (with Elaine Lai and Anthony A. Lee) of the forthcoming book Beyond Dialogue: New Paradigms in Interfaith Discourse (SUNY Press).
At Rutgers, Dr. Goodman will teach an undergraduate course on antisemitism, a course for teachers in the Master Teacher Institute in Holocaust Education, and a seminar for faculty and graduate students.
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.
The Norman and Syril Reitman Visiting Professor (Fall 2025)
Dr. Daniel Stein Kokin is a scholar of Jewish studies affiliated with Arizona State University and the Upper School Librarian of the Ramaz School in New York City. He has previously taught at Yale, UCLA, the University of Oregon, and the University of Greifswald (Germany) and has held fellowships at Villa I Tatti: The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy, the Käte Hamburger Kolleg in Bochum, Germany, and the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University. He has researched and published widely on topics in rabbinic literature, Jewish history, Jewish-Christian relations, and Israeli music, film, and art. He is also the founder and director of the “All the Points” project, which produces interactive, online maps tracing the history of settlement in the Land of Israel, past and present.
At Rutgers, Stein Kokin will teach a mini-course for the public, "Points on the Map: The Rhetoric and Representation of the Jewish Presence in the Land and State of Israel,” and give a seminar for faculty and graduate students, “The Jericho Labyrinth: Image and Interpretation in a Jewish-Christian Visual Motif.” Stein Kokin will also work in collaboration with the Rutgers Initiative for the Book and the Rutgers Libraries.
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.