Month: June 2010

After more than 40 years at Wesleyan.  Professor Jeremy Zwelling is retiring this year.  When Professor Zwelling arrived at Wesleyan in 1967, the University, like many others in the country, had no program in Jewish Studies.  The field as a whole was just beginning to develop.    The Association for Jewish Studies (the AJS) was not founded till two years later, 1969.   But Jeremy Zwelling had a vision: to bring to Wesleyan Jewish Studies at its best, focusing on highest quality scholarship and cultural progamming.  Over the decades, the field of Jewish studies has matured–the AJS now has over 1800 members– and so has the Program at Wesleyan.   We now have eight core faculty contributing to the program, and five additional faculty affiliated with the program.   We offer a wide range of courses in several departments.  JIS at Wesleyan is one of the most active programs contributing academic and cultural events to a broader Wesleyan and Middletown Communities.

Last year, there were seven public events organized by JIS in the fall alone, some within classes taught in JIS.  They included lectures and film showings.  One of the films was shown within the Middle Eastern Film Series, co-organized by Dalit Katz.   In the Spring, we had the Ring Family Israeli Film Festival, organized by Dalit Katz.  It included five new Israeli films, followed by a speaker.  The JIS also coordinated two speakers within the Middle Eastern Studies Speaker Series.  In April we had the annual Frankel Memorial Lecture.  All this in addition to four academic public lectures organized within the JIS curriculum. Please, check this blog for announcements of events and news about the Program.

To be sure, Jeremy Zwelling’s retirement marks a turning point, a beginning of a new era.  But Jewish and Israel Studies is strong and will continue to flourish.  Since December 2009, Magda Teter has been the Director of Jewish and Israel Studies at Wesleyan.  Jeremy Zwelling, though now retired, has promised to remain an active participant of the Wesleyan and Middletown community.

For a report on the event honoring Jeremy Zwelling on May 2, 2010, see Olivia Bartlett’s article in Wesleyan Connections.

Two Jewish and Israel Studies faculty have been appointed to named chairs.

Mark Slobin has been appointed the Richard K. Winslow Professor of Music. Slobin is an ethnomusicologist whose research interests span the music of Afghanistan and central Asia, the music of eastern European Jews in Europe and North America, general theory of ethnomusicology, and ethnomusicology of film. He has served as President of the Society for Ethnomusicology, as President of the Society for Asian Music, as Editor of Asian Music, and as Series Editor of American Musicspheres (Oxford University Press). His awards include the the Seeger Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology (1969), the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award (1983 and 2001), Lifetime Achievement in Jewish Studies from the Foundation for Jewish Culture (2006), and Honorable Mention (with Chana Mlotek)—the Curt Leviant Award in Yiddish Studies from the Modern Languages Association (2008). He has been awarded grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lucius Littauer Foundation, and the International Research and Exchanges Board. He is author of more than 40 articles and author or editor of 18 books, most recently Music at Wesleyan: From Glee Club to Gamelan (forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press); Folk Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2010); Global Soundtracks: Worlds of Film Music (Wesleyan University Press, 2008); American Klezmer: Its Roots and Offshoots (University of California Press, 2002); and Fiddler on the Move: Exploring the Klezmer World (Oxford University Press, 2000). He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

Magda Teter has been appointed the Jeremy Zwelling Associate Professor of Jewish Studies. Teter is a scholar of Jewish history and early modern Europe, focuses on the multifaceted topic of Jewish-Christian relations, especially in the religious and cultural history of Poland. Her work has been supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, YIVO Institute, and the Yad Ha-Nadiv Foundation (Israel), among others. In 2002, she was a Harry Starr Fellow in Jewish Studies at Harvard University, and in 2007-2008, an Emeline Bigelow Conland Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies also at Harvard University. Her first book, Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post-Reformation Era (Cambridge University Press, 2006) was awarded the Jewish Studies Publication Prize by the Koret Foundation. She is also author of From Bread to Blood, from Sin to Crime: Sacrilege and Jews after the Reformation (Harvard University Press, forthcoming) and editor, with Adam Teller, of Early Modern Poland: Borders and Boundaries, in Polin, v. 22 (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2009). She is author of more than 15 articles in English, Hebrew, and Polish, and has delivered more than 35 conference papers. She serves on the editorial board of The AJS Review, the Sixteenth Century Journal, and Polin. She received an M.A. from the School of Oriental Studies at the University of Warsaw, Poland, and her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Columbia University.

See the formal announcement here: http://www.wesleyan.edu/tenuredfaculty/2010_appointments.html