Faculty Notes

Monica Black’s new book A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghosts of the Past in Post-WWII Germany just came out. It looks at a series of mass supernatural eruptions that convulsed West Germany in the 1940s and 50s. These mostly unremembered phenomena offer new insights into the question of how Germans remembered their complicity in the Holocaust, annihilationist war, and racial dictatorship.

Robert Heller, in his 35th year as professor in the School of Journalism and Electronic Media, had his photographs accepted in juried exhibits in Minneapolis, Portland (Oregon), Greenville (South Carolina), and Budapest. He continues to perform in the Knoxville klezmer band, Tennessee Schmaltz.

Heather Hirschfeld's edition of Hamlet for the New Cambridge Shakespeare series was published in 2019. She served as dramaturg for the Clarence Brown production of the play, which was directed by John Sipes and ran in February and March of 2020. She published an essay on the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe in the Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (De Gruyter, 2019). She continues to serve as the director of undergraduate studies for the English department.

Jack Love’s Biblical Hebrew classes continue to be popular. Students read substantial parts of Genesis, Exodus, Judges, and Kings. They are looking forward to the spring semester when they will read from Psalms, Isiaah, and Ezekiel. He is excited to be teaching a new course in the spring semester focused on the history and performance of Jewish liturgical music in the modern era. Finally, he welcomed a new grandson less than a year ago (pictured).

Daniel H. Magilow’s book Holocaust Representations in History: An Introduction (published by Bloomsbury and co-authored with Lisa Silverman, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee) appeared in November 2019 and is now in its second edition. During the 2019–20 school year, Professor Magilow also published three articles on Holocaust film: a survey of trends in contemporary Holocaust film for the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Holocaust, an essay on the 2015 Holocaust revenge fantasy Remember (directed by Atom Egoyan) for a special issue of Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, and, for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, an obituary of Claude Lanzmann, the director of the classic Holocaust documentary Shoah. He has also given several presentations on Holocaust photography, including a short overview of the topic for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which is available at the museum’s website.

Tina Shepardson remains busy as the head of the Department of Religious Studies. In response to national events, she has focused her efforts even more urgently this year on issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, inspired by many others around her who are doing the same. Unfortunately, the pandemic prevented her scheduled trip to Jerusalem and Hebrew University this past spring. She continues to work on her third monograph and two co-edited volumes. She is working with Paula Fredriksen on an essay called “The Shared and Parted Paths of Judaism and Christianity,” for The Cambridge History of Ancient Christianity, and an essay on anti-Jewish rhetoric from Roman Antioch (Antakya, Turkey) for another volume.