Speakers' Biographies
Melissa Raphael:
Professor Melissa Raphael teaches Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Gloucestershire.She has published numerous articles in the fields of religion and gender and feminist theology, specialising in the sacred/profane distinction in Western religion, Feminist Thealogy (sic) and Jewish Theology. She is the author of Rudolf Otto and the Concept of Holiness (Oxford University Press, 1997); Thealogy and Embodiment: The Post-Patriarchal Reconstruction of Female Sacrality (Sheffield Academic Press, 1996); Introducing Thealogy: Discourse on the Goddess (Sheffield Academic Press: 1999) and The Female Face of God in Auschwitz:A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust (Routledge, 2003), shortlisted for the Koret Jewish Book Award in 2004. She is currently working on a study of Jewish theological aesthetics.
Professor Raphael is an Honorary Research Scholar at the University of Wales, Lampeter and sits on the International Board of The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion.She is a member of the European Society for Women in Theological Research and an Associate Member of the Centre for Comparative Studies in Religion and Gender, Bristol University.She is also a member of The Institute for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education and The American Academy of Religion.Professor Raphael also sits on the national committee of the Association of University Departments of Theology and Religious Studies. Professor Raphael is a delegate of the British Government on the International Task Force for Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research.
Website 
Shulamit Reinharz:
Shulamit Reinharz, Ph.D. is the Jacob Potofsky Professor of Sociology at Brandeis University, where she established and directs the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and the Women's Studies Research Center, which has the motto: ‘Where research, art and activism intersect’. She is the author of many books, including Feminist Methods in Social Research (Oxford, 1992), American Jewish Women and the Zionist Enterprise (UPNE, 2005, with Mark Raider), and The JGirl's Guide: The Young Jewish Woman's Handbook for Coming of Age (Jewish Lights, 2005). For the past three years, she has taught a course at Brandeis University on "Jews, Gender and Art."
To celebrate its 10th anniversary, The Hadassah-Brandeis Institute hosted the first overseas exhibition of Hannah Frank's drawings and sculptures in 2007, at Brandeis University.
Website
Laura Levitt
Laura Levitt is the director of the Jewish Studies program at Temple University where she teaches in the Women’s Studies program and the Religion department. Her interdisciplinary work addresses questions of identity, memory and loss. In both Jews and Feminism: The Ambivalent Search for Home (1997) and her co-edited collection, Judaism since Gender (1997) she worked at the intersection of feminist theory and Jewish studies. More recently, her work has turned to visual culture especially photography and film to ask questions about both individual and collected memories and histories. In 2003, she guest edited a special issue of the feminist journal The Scholar and the Feminist Online devoted to American Jewish identity and family photography and co-edited the volume Impossible Images: Contemporary Art after the Holocaust. Her most recent book, American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust (2007), attempts to lift ordinary Jewish losses out from under the shadow of the Holocaust. She uses an experimental style of writing to show how different legacies of loss touch each other. She brings together both a series of family stories told in the first person with close readings of, and critical engagements with works of Holocaust commemoration including Yaffa Eliach’s photographic memorial, the Tower of Faces.
Website
|
