“Sephardic Culture: An Introduction”
Mediterranean Studies Summer Skills Seminar
8—11 July 2024 • Remote

The Summer Skills Seminar,  “Sephardic Culture: An Introduction”  will convene via Zoom from Monday, 8 July to Thursday, 11 July 2024 each day for 2 hours (8-10 PST), break for 1 hour (10-11 PST), and reconvene for 2 hours (11-1 PST).

Go to the program and bibiography

Course overview
This Summer Skills Seminar provides participants with the an overview of main currents in Sephardic Studies including historial and cultural trends, texts, sources for the period 900-1700 CE, and attending to the potential of this field to enhance your own research and teaching. It is designed with academics in mind, particularly graduate students, postdocs, and professors working in disciplines such as history, literature, religious studies, but all intersted parties are welcome to apply. Participants will receive a completion certificate which may be listed on your CV and other documents such as grant/fellowship applications. The seminar is held via zoom over four days, with two two-hour sessions each day. Particpants are expected to prepare readings in advance of the sessions, which will be a blend of lecture, pair and group discussion, group close readings, and in-class activities.

The Jewish Communities of the Iberian Peninsula left behind a rich legacy in historical documentation and writings in the area of rabbinics, polemic, poetry, historiography, travel narrative, mysticism, philosophy, and more. Their expulsion from Spanish territories at the end of the fifteenth century lead to a diasporic network of communities in the Mediterranean, Western Europe, and beyond (The Americas, Africa, Asia).

This four-day intensive skills seminar will provide participants with a broad overview of main historical and cultural trends of Premodern Sephardic Studies paired with close readings of representative texts in English (versions in original languages and/or Spanish will be also made avaialable). The seminar is organized both chronologically and generically: we will trace the development of poetry, prose, historiography, and mysticism from Sephardic al-Andalus (900-1200), to Sephardic Christian Iberia (1200-1500), to the Sephardic Diaspora (1500-1700).

The goal is to provides attendees with a basic preparation for including Sephardic sources in teaching and research and provide them with a bona fide (in the form of a certificate of completion for those who attend the full seminar), which may be advantageous in securing grants or other funding for research and travel. Preparation in Sephardic studies can be a way for scholars working in Hispanic, Mediterranean, or Jewish studies (or other fields) to distinguish their research and/or teaching profiles, and put them in discussion with new interlocutors.

This Summer Skills Seminar builds on the experience of earlier editions, which participants signaled as “transformative” in terms of their research, and which provided them with an opportunity to network and lay the foundations for future collaborations. For information and participant reviews of our former Skills Seminars (Ladino/Judezmo & Aljamiado) see here.

Faculty

The course will be conducted by Prof. David A. Wacks (Romance Languages, University of Oregon; PhD UC Berkeley 2003), Harry Starr Fellow in Jewish Studies (Harvard, 2006), and recipient of the 2015 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Sephardic Culture. His research focuses on the literary footprint of the confluence of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the Iberian Peninsula and Sephardic Diaspora. He blogs on his current research at davidwacks.uoregon.edu.

Participants

Amy Aronson
(Modern and Classical Languages, Valdosta State University )
Amy I. Aronson received her Ph.D. in Medieval Spanish Literature and Hispanic Linguistics from Temple University, Philadelphia, PA.  She is currently Professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at Valdosta State University, Valdosta, GA, where she teaches both online and face to face classes in language, literature and culture.  She is the former Director of the Peru Study Abroad Program and has assisted in the Department’s Study Abroad Program to Guadalajara, Mexico.  Her book, Marginal Voices: Studies in Converso Literature, was published by Brill Press, Leiden, The Netherlands.  She has published many articles on Conversos.  Current research projects include a manuscript, in progress, on Jewish Prostitution Throughout Time and Space and other articles on conversos in both the Old and New Worlds.  In her free time, when she is not teaching or researching, she enjoys traveling, making and selling jewelry and horseback riding.  She runs a small equine rescue program adopting horses headed to slaughter in Mexico, rehabilitates and rehomes them.  She currently has three horses on the property, three dogs and a cat, all of whom take up not only her time but also hold a large space in her heart.

Augusto Rocha
(History, University of Colorado Boulder)
Augusto Rocha is a PhD student in the History Department at the University of Colorado Boulder. He completed his undergraduate studies at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (BR). His first Master's degree, with an emphasis on History, Power, and Culture, was obtained from the Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, while his second Master's degree in Political History was earned at the Universidade Estadual de Maringá, both in Brazil. His research interests include Late Medieval Iberia and Early Modern European History, with a focus on Portuguese and Spanish history and specifically looking at the ideas of identity that marked the Muslim and Jewish community of Iberia, before, during, and after expulsion. 

Sharon Portnoff
(Classics, Arabic, and Jewish Studies, Connecticut College)
Sharon Portnoff is the Elie Wiesel Associate Professor of Judaic Studies and Chair of the Department of Classics, Arabic, and Jewish Studies at Connecticut College. She received a B.A. from St. John’s College, Annapolis, an M.Ed. from Harvard University, and an MA (Jewish Studies) and Ph.D. (Jewish Philosophy) from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Among her publications are Reason and Revelation Before Historicism: Strauss and Fackenheim. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011; The Companionship of Books: Essays in Honor of Laurence Berns. Edited by Alan Udoff, Sharon Portnoff and Martin D. Yaffe. New York: Lexington Books, 2012; and Emil L. Fackenheim: Philosopher, Theologian, Jew. Edited by Sharon Portnoff, James A. Diamond and Martin D. Yaffe. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2007. Her current research focuses on Primo Levi’s reimagining of Lucretius, Virgil and Dante in his Holocaust memoirs.

Marina Rahlin
(Art History: California State University Long Beach)
For the past 3 years I’ve been absorbing myself in art history at CSULB, focusing on marks of identity and the marginalized communities represented in the European art of the Medieval world. I know first-hand what it’s like to be an outsider;  I spent the first years of my life in suppressive Ukraine, grew up in Israel, and immigrated to Los Angeles in 2007 on my own, as an international student, to attend the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising.  In the Soviet Union, my family’s Jewishness made us the Other. In Israel, our Sovietness earned us a similar treatment. The journey from being a minority in Ukraine to an immigrant in Israel and ultimately finding a home in California, made me an observer, taught me resilience and has given me a unique, wider perspective on the world. I’m now applying for grad school and would like to focus on art representing Jews and conversos in medieval Spain. My goal is to teach in University and work as a curator on Jewish themed exhibitions