Center for Jewish StudiesThe 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. Fellowships offer advanced graduate students the opportunity to engage with prominent national and international scholars in Jewish Studies visiting the seminar and to connect with the Jewish Studies faculty active in the seminar. Fellows receive a research stipend and a seminar session devoted to their work. The Shatzmiller Fellows are funded by the Duke Center for Jewish Studies.
Erika Mejia is a third year PhD student in the Department of Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she focuses on the history and practice of translation in Modern Hebrew literature. Her dissertation will explore Spanish to Hebrew translation through the oeuvre of Federico García Lorca, with a particular emphasis on the import of foreign poetic forms into a Jewish context and the quest for stability in the practice of translation. Her interests include translation theory and hermeneutics, literary reception, and canon formation.
Joanna Spyra is a PhD candidate in Jewish history at the University of Bergen, Norway. Her doctoral project explores different Jewish health care organizations and the relationship between ethnicity and philanthropy in interwar Argentina. Her research is situated at the intersection of migration history, minority studies, and gender theory. Joanna graduated from Jagiellonian University and Cracow University of Economics, and most recently from Brandeis University where she received a master’s degree in Jewish Professional Leadership and Near Eastern and Judaic Studies.