Faculty Notes
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Robert Blitt (UT College of Law) was named the Toms Foundation Distinguished Professor of Law at the College of Law. Highlights of Blitt's writing during this period included a policy brief published by the Brookings Institution and Georgetown University's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs concerning the Kremlin's use of religion as a soft power foreign policy lever, a law review article addressing the Trump administration's use of misinformation and disinformation to subvert international human rights norms, and several op-eds exploring the foreign policy implications of amendments to Russia's constitution. Blitt and family also celebrated two beautiful and much anticipated simchas: Noah Blitt's bar mitzvah and the publication of Pinchas Blitt's Holocaust memoir, A Promise of Sweet Tea (Azrleli Foundation, 2021). |
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Gregory Kaplan (Hispanic Studies, Department of Modern Foreign Languages & Literatures) published an article, "Converso Refugee Travel in the Treatises of Saul Levi Mortera" (in eHumanista 51, pp. 551-561), related to his ongoing project on Mortera, who was the rabbi and teacher of Baruch Spinoza until he oversaw the rabbinic panel that excommunicated Spinoza in 1656. After performing research during the summer of 2022 at the Ets Haim Library in Amsterdam, Kaplan receveid faculty development leave for fall 2022 to work on his book project, "A seventeenth-century Q&A about the Apocalypse between a Christian cleric from Rouen and a rabbi from Amsterdam." |
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Jack Love (Department of Religious Studies) continues to teach Biblical Hebrew and is looking forward to offering a Jewish philosophy course this spring. The course will begin with Baruch Spinoza, and move forward to explore modern Jewish philosophy in several of its dimensions. Along with his wife Terri Lee who serves as the Dean of Arts and Sciences, Love is looking forward to moving into some sort of retirement phase. |
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Daniel H. Magilow (German Studies, Department of Modern Foreign Languages & Literatures) co–taught the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's annual Curt C. and Else Silberman Faculty Seminar in June 2022, which was attended by more than 20 scholars from the United States and Canada who ranged from late–stage doctoral students to professors with decades of teaching experience. The 2022 Silberman Seminar explored the topic of "Teaching Holocaust Photographs" by looking at how and why these images were originally created, and how Holocaust photographs have been used in scholarship, teaching, and the public domain. Alongside this teaching work, Magilow helped co-organize the Lessons and Legacies Regional Holocaust Studies Conference with Helene Sinnreich in November 2021 and, also with Sinnreich, he is a co-editor-in-chief of the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He currently serves on the Academic Council of the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University and on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Academic Committee. His new book, The Absolute Realist: Collected Writings of Albert Renger-Patzsch, 1923–1967 (Getty Publications) will appear in November 2022. |
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Tina Shepardson (Department of Religious Studies) looks forward to her last year as head of the Department of Religious Studies. The publication of two co-edited books in the past year remains some of her biggest recent professional successes: one volume on Religious Rivalry in Late Antiquity, and another volume Syriac Christianity that is written for a wider audience. Last year included an invited presentation in Toronto at a conference on Jewish-Christian relations and Christian anti-Jewish Polemics in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and this year she has been invited to present her research at a conference in Ottawa. In June, she received a UT Alumni Association's Outstanding Teacher Award, and in August she was named a Distinguished Professor in the Humanities in recognition of her ongoing research and scholarship. Summer 2022 also included a pandemic-delayed trip to Jerusalem to deliver the annual Brenninkmeijer-Werhahn Lecture on Early Christianity at Hebrew University, where she also led a graduate seminar. |
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Phillip W. Stokes (Arabic, Department of Modern Foreign Languages & Literatures) specializes in the history of the Semitic language family and focuses especially on the history of the Arabic language. Stokes's recent research has focused on the language of non-Classical Arabic medieval literature, such as Judaeo-Arabic writings from the Cairo Genizah, as well as Christian texts from St. Catherine's Monastery (Sinai). He has studied Biblical, Mishnaic, and Modern Hebrew, as well as various dialects of Aramaic, and regularly integrates relevant aspects of these languages into his work. |