North Carolina Jewish Studies Seminar

FALL 2026– SPRING 2027 SEMINAR DATES AND SPEAKERS

FALL SEMESTER

Saskia Ziolkowski

Duke University

"Yiddish Worlds in Italian: Migration, European Affinities, and Orality”

• August 30, 2026 3:00 pm Eastern time (Hybrid)

Saskia Ziolkowski is Associate Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University and works on Italian literature and culture from a comparative perspective, especially in terms of the connections between Italy and German-language countries. Her research topics include modernism, the novel, animal studies, world literature, Jewish studies, migration, literary history, and issues of identity. Her book Kafka’s Italian Progeny (University of Toronto Press, awarded the American Association of Italian Studies 2020 Book Prize in Literary Studies) explores Franz Kafka’s sometimes surprising connections with key writers — from Massimo Bontempelli, Lalla Romano, and Italo Calvino to Antonio Tabucchi, Paola Capriolo, and Elena Ferrante — who have shaped Italy’s literary landscape.

Ziolkowski is currently working on a monograph on Jewishness in modern Italian literature and has published related articles “Jewish Images and Transnational Histories in Italian Writing, from Elsa Morante to Helena Janeczek” in Annali d'italianistica (2024), “Italian Ghetto Stories: A Transnational Literary History" in Forum Italicum (2023), and “For a Jewish Italian Literary History: From Italo Svevo to Igiaba Scego” in Italian Culture (2022), and a chapter "Neither Rich, Nor Poor, Neither Jewish, Neither Catholic: The Legacies of Natalia Ginzburg’s Negations" in Natalia Ginzburg's Global Legacies (2024). 

Ziolkowski holds a  hold a Ph.D. in Italian and Comparative Literature and Society from Columbia and a BA from Princeton University.

Ayelet Brinn

Hebrew Union College, Skirball (Los Angeles) Campus

• October 4, 2026; 3:00 pm Eastern time (Hybrid)

Ayelet Brinn is Assistant Professor at Hebrew Union College's Skirball (Los Angeles) Campus.  Her research focuses on American Jewish history, gender, Yiddish studies, and popular culture. 

Brinn holds a PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania and master’s degrees in history and library science from Indiana University.   She was previously assistant professor of modern Jewish history and associate director of the Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford and has held fellowships at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and at Fordham University and Columbia University.

Her first book, A Revolution in Type: Gender and the Making of the American Yiddish Press, was published by New York University Press in November 2023 and received the the Association for Jewish Studies’ 2025 Jordan Schnitzer Award in Modern Jewish History & Culture: Africa, Americas, Asia, & Oceania.  She had also been awarded a summer fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Brinn is currently writing a second book, which will examine U.S. censorship and surveillance of the Yiddish press during World War I and the first Red Scare. She has also published articles in such prestigious journals as Studies in American Jewish Literature and American Jewish History on topics that include Jewish American journalism during the beginning of the 20th century and female journalists in the American Yiddish press.

Frederica Francesconi

University of Albany

• November 15, 2026; 3:00 pm Eastern time (Hybrid)

Federica Francesconi is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Judaic Studies Program at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her research and publications address the social, religious, and cultural aspects of the early modern history of Jews in Italy, focusing on the multifaceted politics and dynamics of ghetto life. She has held fellowships in Europe, Israel, and the United States. She served as Viterbi Visiting Professor in Mediterranean Jewish Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has been a fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.

Her recent book, "Invisible Enlighteners: The Jewish Merchants of Modena, from the Renaissance to the Emancipation" (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), is the 2022 Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize Winner, granted by the American Historical Association and the 2021 National Jewish Books Awards Finalist for the JDC-Herbert Katzki Award for Writing Based on Archival Material. Among her other publications, there are two coedited volumes: "From Catalonia to the Caribbean: The Sephardi Orbit from Medieval to Modern Times" (2018) and "Jewish Women's History from Antiquity to the Present" (2021). The latter is the 2021 National Jewish Books Awards Finalist for the Barbara Dobkin Award in Women Studies.

She is currently at work on a new monograph provisionally titled “The Jewish Home in Early Modern Venice: Cosmopolitan Intimacy, Global Networks, and Diasporic Material Culture.” The book explores the Jewish home in Venice during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a multi-religious and multi-ethnic webwork of individuals, communities, and objects in motion. The project has received a 2022-24 Gladys Krieble Delmas Grant and a 2024-25 Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture Fellowship Grant 2024-2025. In Spring 2025, Dr. Francesconi will be a Berenson Fellow at I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for the Renaissance Studies in Florence.

Dr. Francesconi is interested in working with graduate and undergraduate students on early modern Jewish social and cultural history; Mediterranean studies; European history; gender history and theory; material culture, everyday life, and the built environment.   

 Yair Wallach

University of London, SOAS

• December 13, 2026; 3:00 pm Eastern time (Hybrid)

Dr Yair Wallach is a social and cultural historian of modern Palestine/Israel, studying the entangled and relational histories of Jews and Palestinians.   He specialises in the urban history of the Middle East and is based at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where he directs the Centre for Jewish Studies.  He is also a commentator on Israel/Palestine and on antisemitism.

His work has focused primarily on visual and material culture and on the urban fabric as sites and vehicles of contestation and transformation in late Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine. Before coming to SOAS, Wallach was a post-doctoral research associate at Cambridge University, as part of the "Conflict in Cities" project.

His book, A City in Fragments: Urban Text in Modern Jerusalem (Stanford University Press, 2020), looked at Arabic and Hebrew texts in the urban environment, on placards, signs and artefacts, and showed how reading, writing and the very meaning of textuality changed between the 1850s and 1948.  The book explores how street texts were used to write and re-write population and space; how long-established textual artefacts such as Islamic and Jewish stone inscriptions, Arabic gold-embroidered banners, and Hebrew pilgrims’ graffiti, were sidelined and sometimes banned. At the same time, new texts, such as street-name plates, shop signs and ID cards were introduced to organise the city in the service of colonialism, settler-colonialism, nationalism, and capitalism. The book won the Association for Jewish Studies’ Jordan Schnitzer Book Prize in 2022.

More recently, Wallach’s research has moved to questions of migration, race and whiteness. In 2020-22 he was a Leverhulme Research Fellow, gathering material for his next book on the integration and acculturation of Jewish migrants from Central and Eastern Europe (Ashkenazim) in Arab society and culture in Egypt, Palestine and Lebanon in the 19th and 20th century. This research investigates the difference between migrants and settlers, and studies the manner in which the migrants were racialised (by themselves, the Arab society and by outsiders).

In addition to scholarly writing, Wallach has also written on Israel/Palestine and on Antisemitism for the Guardian, Haaretz, 972+, and other publications.

SPRING SEMESTER

Karen Underhill 

University of Illinois, Chicago

• January 24, 2027; 3:00 pm Eastern time (Hybrid)

Karen Underhill is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the UIC Department of Polish, Russian and Lithuanian Studies, and author of Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish Modernity (Indiana University Press, 2024). Her research focuses on multilingual Polish Jewish Culture, changing memory of Poland’s Jewish past, and hybrid and diasporic cultural forms that arose in the multilingual context of 19th and 20th century Poland and Central Europe. In 2001 she co-founded Massolit Books & Cafe in Kraków, Poland, and returned to earn a PhD in Polish and Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago in 2011.  She was 2012-2013 Joseph Kremen Memorial Fellow at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and joined the University of Illinois Chicago in 2012, where she has focused on developing a multilingual Polish-Jewish Studies curriculum in literature and film. She is currently working on a comparative study of the changing treatment and adaptation of the figures of Jacob Frank and Adam Mickiewicz within both Yiddish and Polish literatures and cultural debates of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Nina Caputo 

University of Florida

• February 28, 2027; 3:00 pm Eastern time (Hybrid)

Nina Caputo is an Associate Professor emerita at the University of Florida. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Caputo is a scholar of medieval Jewish history and interfaith relations in medieval Europe. She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, and Florida International University, and has been a recipient of a Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Penn Humanities Center and a Dorest Fellowship at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.

Caputo is author of Nahmanides in Medieval Catalonia: History, Community, Messianism (2007) and Debating Truth: The Barcelona Disputation of 1263, A Graphic History (Oxford 2017), illustrated by Liz Clarke. She has also co-edited Faithful Narratives: Historians, Religion, and the Challenge of Objectivity (Cornell, 2014) and, with Mitchell B. Hart, On the Word of a Jew. Religion, Reliability, and the Dynamics of Trust (Indiana, 2019).

She is currently working on a book on the figure of the Jewish convert to Christianity in the middle ages. Professor Caputo’s recent courses include “Medieval Jewish History,” “Early Modern Jewish History,” “Holy War,” “Religion and Politics in Medieval Iberia,” and “Apocalypse and Millennium in the Middle Ages.” Her graduate students work in medieval Jewish history, medieval history, and early modern Sephardic culture.

Shatzmiller Fellows

• April 18, 2027; 3:00 pm Eastern time (Hybrid)

NCJSS welcomes presentations from the 2026-27 Shatzmiller Fellowship cohort.  The Shatzmiller Graduate Fellows honor Emeritus Smart Professor Joseph Shatzmiller, who taught at Duke University from 1994 to 2010. Among his many publications, he is best known for Shylock Reconsidered: Jews, Moneylending, and Medieval Society and Jews, Medicine, and Medieval Society.