Gastwissenschaftler*innen

Project title
Reading the Room: The Trope of the Room in Modern Hebrew Literature

Project description
This project explores how the ḥeder—the traditional study room where Ashkenazi Jewish boys received their early religious education—continues to shape modern Hebrew literature. Originally a physical space of learning, the ḥeder became a powerful literary symbol through which writers explore questions of memory, identity, authorship, and the changing relationship between tradition and modernity.

Focusing primarily on works by authors of Eastern European origin, the study also incorporates Mizrahi and feminist perspectives. It places Hebrew literature in dialogue with texts in Yiddish and Arabic, examining the kuttāb—a parallel educational institution in Jewish communities in Islamic countries—to understand how different Jewish communities negotiated questions of belonging, education, and cultural change. By tracing these spaces across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the project challenges linear narratives of secularization and cultural memory, positioning space itself as a critical lens for reading modern Hebrew literature.

Funding programme
Minerva Fellowship Programme

Period of stay at the Institute
2026–2028

Project title:
Reading “Against the Grain”: Ways of Constructing a Converso Judaizing Identity

Project description:
This project investigates how conversos and crypto-Jews in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries appropriated approved Christian devotional and catechetical texts through clandestine and subversive reading practices. Drawing on inquisitorial archives from Europe, the Americas, and the Portuguese imperial world, it explores reading as an act of resistance under censorship and persecution. By focusing on the reception of permitted books rather than forbidden ones, the project offers a new perspective on readerly agency, identity formation, and Sephardic cultural history.

Funding:
Minerva Postdoctoral Fellowship (Max Planck Society)

Period at the Institute:
October 2024 – April 2027