Kirsten Collins, Coordinator of the Jewish Studies Workshop  (kirstenc@uchicago.edu) is a 7th-year Ph.D. Candidate in Religion, Literature and Visual Culture at the Divinity School. She works on the relationship between race and religion in mid-twentieth
century French philosophy and literary theory, and has been the recipient of the Fuerstenberg
Fellowship in Jewish Studies, the Anthony C. Yu Fellowship in Religion, Literature and Visual
Culture, and the 2022-2023 Lurcy Fellowship for study in France.

Kenneth Moss, Faculty Co-advisor to the Jewish Studies Workshop, is historian of Jewish politics, culture, literature and thought in the modern era. His work concerns how Jewish visions of cultural and political self-determination were realized, frustrated, unmade, or recast across the 20th century from Russia, Ukraine, and Poland to Palestine and Israel, and what happened to Jews in the process. His first book, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2009) examines the triumph and tragedy of bids for Yiddish and Hebrew cultural renaissance, and received the 2010 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. His most recent book, An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland (Harvard University Press, 2021), which presents an intellectual and social history of Polish Jewry’s Zionist and Diasporist thinkers, has received the 2022 National Jewish Book Award for History from the Jewish Book Council. Currently, he is completing an annotated collection of primary sources covering major trends in Jewish cultural production in period form 1880 to 1918, a study of the American Yiddish poet Arn Glanz-Leyeles, Jewish Americanism, and the fate of Jewish humanism after the Holocaust, and a project provisionally entitled Israel’s Future: A History, which will examine the idiom of catastrophe through which state and military planners, state and military planners, intellectuals, business circles, and nationalist and ethnoreligious parties have approached Israel’s future, and the future of the occupied territories and of the Palestinians under occupation.

Na’ama Rokem, Faculty Co-advisor to the Jewish Studies Workshop, is Associate Professor of Hebrew Literature in the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations and in the Department of Comparative Literature. She works on Modern Hebrew and German-Jewish literature. Her first book, Prosaic Conditions: Heinrich Heine and Spaces of Zionist Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2013) argues that prose — as a figure of thought, a mode and a medium — played an instrumental role in the literary foundations of the Zionist revolution. Herr second project, currently titled Dispatches in Translation: A Network of German-Hebrew Letters, maps a network of correspondences that cross between the two languages through chapters on canonical writers in German and Hebrew, offering a new perspective on multilingualism, modern Jewish literature, and the poetics of self-translation. She has collaborated on  projects including co-taught courses on bilingualism in linguistics, literary studies, and creative writing,  the Neubauer project The Quest for Modern Language: Between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and has worked with colleagues in Chicago Studies, the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity, the History Department, and with a community organization – The Bronzeville Historical Society – on a project that uses the Oak Woods Cemetery in Woodlawn as a site for teaching, programming, and researching the history of the South Side of Chicago, with a particular interest in the complexly intertwined histories of African Americans and Jews.