Faculty

Ethan Katz

Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies; Faculty Director, Center for Jewish Studies

Ethan Katz is Associate Professor in the Department of History and the Center for Jewish Studies. He is a historian of modern Europe and the Mediterranean, with specialties in modern Jewish history and the history of modern France and its empire. To date, his scholarship has focused in four principal areas: the history of Jewish-Muslim relations and the nature of belonging and exclusion in modern France and the Francophone world; the history of Jews in colonial societies; Holocaust Studies; and the relationship between the secular and religion in modern Jewish life....

Henrike C. Lange

Associate Professor, Italian Renaissance Art and Architecture

Henrike Lange is a historian of art, architecture, and literature in the medieval and early modern worlds of Europe — especially in Italy and across the Mediterranean — and the long nineteenth century. Across her disciplines, she has long engaged with the works and legacies of Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Erich Auerbach, Aby Warburg, Ernst Gombrich, Erwin Panofsky, Ernst Cassirer, Richard Krautheimer, and Friedrich Hollaender.

Lange’s work in history and historiography is informed by the German-Jewish intellectual tradition, exile and migration from Germany,...

Duncan MacRae

Associate Professor

Duncan MacRae is an Associate Professor of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies. A Roman historian, he specializes in the history of religion in the Roman world, including the history of the Jews under Roman rule. He has written on 1 Maccabees, Josephus and early (tannaitic) Rabbinic literature, as well as on Roman perspectives on Jewish history. The ways that each side – Jewish and Roman – negotiated and experienced imperial power and violence is the key theme of this work. He has also written on early Christian antisemitic reception of Josephus. He anticipates future work on...

Roni Masel

Assistant Professor
Comparative Literature

Roni Masel is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature specializing in Hebrew and Yiddish literatures. Other research and teaching interests also include modern Jewish history and culture in Eastern Europe, the history of reading and history of the book, and queer and postcolonial theory. Masel is currently completing a book manuscript titled Bad Readers: Misreading, Mistranslation, and Other Textual Malpractices in Hebrew and Yiddish, which explores Jewish literatures in Eastern Europe from the perspective of reading and...

Susan Maslan

Associate Professor of French

Susan Maslan is an Associate Professor of French at UC Berkeley. Her work is situated at the crossroads of literary, political, and social history. She writes and teaches about seventeenth-and eighteenth-century theater, the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, and human rights. In a book tentatively entitled Judaism and Israelites in Early Modern French Literature, she pursues her interests in the relation between French literature and the Hebrew Bible in figures as varied as Racine, Rousseau, and...

James I. Porter

The Irving Stone Chair in Literature; Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric and Classics
James Porter began teaching at the University of Michigan in Classics and Comparative Literature (1986-2007), and then at UC Irvine, Classics and Comparative Literature (2007-2015), where he served as Director of Critical Theory from 2014-2015. He has held visiting professorships at Princeton and Bristol University (UK) and has also taught at UCLA.

Porter’s teaching and research has followed a few different trajectories. One is a study of Nietzsche’s thought, early and late (Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future and The Invention of Dionysus: An...

Jonathan Sheehan

Professor
History

Jonathan Sheehan is an historian with particular interests in the cultural and intellectual history of early modern Europe, the history of religion, science, and scholarship. Other areas include: the history of secularism and secularization, Jewish-Christian relations, the history of the disciplines, the afterlife of the Protestant Reformation, and the history of reading and print culture. He is co-founder and co-director from 2012-2019 of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion

Ronit Stahl

Assistant Professor
History
Ronit Y. Stahl is Assistant Professor in the Department of History and a faculty affiliate of the religious diversity cluster of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society. She is a historian of modern America and her work focuses on religious pluralism in American society by examining how politics, law, and religion interact in institutions. Her first book, Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2017) demonstrates how, despite the constitutional separation of church and state, the federal...

Scott Straus

Professor
Political Science

Scott Straus is a professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, and an affiliate of the Center for Jewish Studies. He previously served as the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as well as the Chair and Associate Chair of the Department of Political Science. Straus received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2004.

Alan Tansman

Professor, East Asian Languages and Cultures

For many years, Alan Tansmanhas taught courses on cultural responses to atrocity in the Jewish and Japanese experience, but reaching beyond those cases to examples from Africa, the United States, Indonesia, and Europe. He has published on the pedagogy of teaching atrocity comparatively and on the Japanese photography of atrocity. He is now writing a book that treats the aesthetics and form of cultural work (in the above cases) that struggles for a non-figurative response to violence.