Who's who? Our members' research and teaching interests in Jewish religion, culture and society:
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Tali Artman Partock
Tali works on intercultural and inter-religious dialogue in Late Antiquity, especially between rabbinic literature and church fathers. She is particularly interested in questions of gender and sexuality, visions of hell, and intersections of religion and politics. In 2021-22, Tali is teaching at Leo Baeck College and the University of Cambridge.
Laliv Clenman
Laliv’s research focuses on classical rabbinic sources, from the Mishna and Tosefta through the halakhic and aggadic midrashim to the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds. She is currently exploring the complex interplay between legal and narrative texts for her book on Intermarriage in Rabbinic Law and Lore. Laliv’s interests in gender, sexuality and the fate of the individual under rabbinic law come together in her work on a feminist commentary to the first chapter of Bavli Ketubot. Laliv supervises PhD projects engaging with historical and contemporary issues related to rabbinic law and narrative at King’s, and teaches future progressive rabbis in Rabbinic Literature and languages at Leo Baeck College, London (LBC). – Laliv’s webpage at the LBC.
Yuval Evri
Yuval’s current research project focuses on a group of Arab-Jewish intellectuals in early 20th-century Palestine who viewed their time as an ‘Andalusian moment’ in which Jews and Muslims came together in a shared homeland, as they had done in medieval Iberia before the expulsion. While the increasing hostility between Jews and Arabs opened a linguistic breach between Hebrew and Arabic, they insisted on holding on to both languages, positioning themselves in the borderland between them, and using translation as a political and cultural tool. Yuval’s research focuses on linguistic, structural, and thematic aspects that reflect the turbulent Palestinian politics of the 1920s and 1930s, on their public reception, and on their broader political context and implications. Since 2021, Yuval is an Assistant Professor at Brandeis University.
Wendy Filer
Wendy’s PhD research focuses on the judicial system of London’s Sephardic Jews in the 18th and early 19th centuries to investigate the effects, both positive and negative, of local legal culture on a minority legal system. England’s pluralistic legal culture, favouring arbitration and mediation of disputes, provided a space within which the community’s Mahamad could offer a halakhically compliant informal dispute resolution service. This legal space promoted compromise as a religious value, whilst at the same time enabling access to secular justice when it failed. Wendy analyses how open access to secular justice affected individual jurisdictional choice, thereby shaping the vibrancy and long-term viability of this community-based Jewish legal space.
Paul Joyce
Paul’s work focuses on the exegesis and also the reception of selected Hebrew Bible texts, including the books of Ezekiel, Lamentations/ Eichah, and Amos. Publications include Ezekiel: A Commentary (T&T Clark, 2007), Lamentations through the Centuries (Blackwell, 2013, with Diana Lipton), and The God Ezekiel Creates (T&T Clark, 2015, edited with Dalit Rom-Shiloni). He is currently writing a commentary on Amos for the Illuminations Commentary series (Eerdmans). More information on Paul’s profile.
Susannah Rees
Susannah is a PhD student in her first year at King’s College London. Her research focuses on the role that cosmetics play in the construction and performance of identity in ancient Israel. She uses anthropological models, ethnographic material, and archaeological data to illuminate the role of body adornment in prophetic texts in the Hebrew Bible as well as comparative material from the Ancient Near East. Susannah is also the British and Irish Association for Jewish Studies studentship holder in 2021-22.
Emma Rozenberg
Emma’s interdisciplinary PhD research explores mamzerut – a stigma which attaches to children born of certain forbidden relationships under Jewish law and is passed on, indefinitely, through generations. Her focus is on mamzerut as a contemporary issue within the British Jewish community. Through interviewing individuals affected by mamzerut, and rabbis, activists and others with professional experience of the issue, she combines qualitative research with halakhic analysis and gender and legal theory to examine the full impact of mamzerut in the UK today. – To participate in her research, or for more information, please contact emma.rozenberg@kcl.ac.uk.
Andrea Schatz
At the moment, Andrea wonders how ‘progress’ has been made: how did early modern European Jews engage – in Hebrew and Yiddish – with the history of their exilic times and places? How did they relate to ‘progress’ as an emerging normative concept in Christian, secular and colonial projects of modernity? How did they promote continuity and connectedness as critical terms? And how might their texts speak to current reflections on multiple temporalities, displacement and belonging in a fragile world? In 2020-21, Andrea has been pursuing these questions as a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS). More information on Andrea’s profile.
Ruth Sheldon
Ruth explores what is at stake when conflicting groups are brought into contact within secular-Christian and post-colonial spaces in contemporary Britain. She has approached this through a long-term ethnographic study published as Tragic Encounters and Ordinary Ethics: Palestine-Israel in British Universities (2016). More recently, she has studied everyday relationships between neighbours in Hackney, London. These projects have given rise to her interest in questions about Jewish life within secular-modernity, leading to a study on ‘Jewish unbelief’, and ongoing reflections on what it means to undertake Jewish ethnography within the field of British sociology. More information on Ruth’s profile.
Jonathan Stökl
Jonathan studies biblical texts in their ancient contexts, informed by modern philology, theory, and understanding of the wider ancient world. I currently study priestly ordination in the Bible and in other ancient Near Eastern texts. In the past my work has focussed on prophets and prophecy. More information on Jonathan’s profile.
Adam Sutcliffe
Adam is a historian of Jewish/non-Jewish relations, in particular in relation to the early modern and modern history of western thought. His book on the idea of Jewish world-historical purpose, among both Jews and non-Jews, from c. 1600 to the present has been published by Princeton University Press in 2019. More information on Adam’s profile.
Joan Taylor
Joan Taylor works on Second Temple Judaism, through to the Bar Kokhba Revolt, particularly in regard to history, archaeology and women. In terms of literature, she is most interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo and Josephus, and also in classical authors writing about Jews. She is the author of numerous books and articles in this field, including Jewish Women Philosophers of First-Century Alexandria: Philo’s ‘Therapeutae’ Reconsidered (2003) and, most recently, the Essenes, the Scrolls and the Dead Sea (2012). Her commentary on Philo of Alexandria’s treatise De Vita Contemplativa is shortly to appear with Brill/SBL. More information on Joan’s profile.
Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz
Lindsey’s research focuses on modern Jewish women and different facets of their religious lives. Her current projects include an investigation into the possibly magical nature of some contemporary Jewish women’s practices, a study of the first three women to receive Orthodox rabbinic ordination, and a gender-based reappraisal of Haym Soloveitchik’s famous article, ‘Rupture and Reconstruction’ (1994). Lindsey also teaches at the London School of Jewish Studies (LSJS) and is active in interfaith textual study, particularly Scriptural Reasoning. Her book Challenge and Conformity: The Religious Lives of Orthodox Jewish Women has been published by the Littman Library in 2019.
Julian Weiss
Julian teaches and researches the literary culture of medieval and early modern Iberia with a particular focus on interfaith relations between Muslims, Jews and Christians. As part of a major collaborative research project funded by the AHRC, ‘Language Acts and Worldmaking’, he is currently studying the cultural legacies of these relations after the expulsions from Iberia at the end of the Middle Ages. His book project on the early modern reception of Josephus examines how translations, prints and reading practices open up multiple perspectives on Christian/Jewish relations in the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking worlds and their contact zones, while his research on the modern ballad tradition in ladino from Morocco and elsewhere explores how the poetic representation of the medieval Christian/Muslim frontier operates as a form of cultural memory for Sephardic Jews of the twentieth century. More information on Julian’s profile.