Bildner Center Visiting Scholars

Visiting Scholars

The Bildner Center brings visiting scholars to Rutgers to promote research and scholarly exchange and to teach courses in Jewish Studies. Visiting scholars contribute to the intellectual vigor and diversity of Rutgers' educational experience, adding to its growing reputation as a center of excellence in the burgeoning field of Jewish studies. Visiting scholars participate in faculty seminars and contribute to the Bildner Center educational activities within the university as well as its outreach programs for the community.

Faculty and visitors affiliated with the Center pursue a wide range of research areas within the field of Jewish Studies, such as Eastern European Jewish history, Jewish immigrants in America, Jewish religious movements, early Rabbinic Midrash, Hebrew and Yiddish literature and culture, Jewish identity and education, Jewish memory, Israeli politics, Israeli society and culture, Jews and the media, and the ethnography of Jewish communities.

Visiting Scholars:

Samuel (Muli) Peleg (Fall 2010 - Spring 2011)

Schusterman Visiting Professor in Israel Studies

Samuel (Muli) Peleg, an expert in conflict resolution, is the Schusterman Visiting Scholar in Israel Studies for 2009–2010. A professor of political science and communication at Netanya College and a senior lecturer at the Inter-Disciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, Peleg is also a research fellow at the Stanford Center for International Conflict Resolution and Negotiation. His books include If Words Could Kill: The Failure of the Israeli Political Discourse (Academon Books, 2003, in Hebrew), The Consuming Fire: the Fatal Nexus between Religion and Violence (Polity Press, 2009), and Communication: From Discord to Coexistence (Hakibbutz Hameuchad, forthcoming, in Hebrew). Peleg has been a top adviser on leadership and negotiations for the Peres Center for Peace and is currently the Israeli co-chairman of One Voice, an organization that promotes dialogue and reconciliation among various factions of Israeli society as well as between Israelis and Palestinians. At Rutgers, Peleg will teach "Israeli Politics" and "Israeli Society through Film" during the fall semester and two courses in the spring, including "Arab-Israeli Conflict."

Federica Francesconi (Fall 2010)

Aresty Visiting Scholar

Federica Francesconi earned her Ph.D. in Jewish history from the University of Haifa in 2007, and she is developing her dissertation into a book, “The Wealth of Silver: The Journey of the Modenese Jews from the Renaissance to Emancipation (1598–1814).” An expert in modern Italian Jewish history, she generally focuses on the cultural and social history of Jews in early modern Europe, paying special attention to Italian Jewish culture. Francesconi has held fellowships at the University of Oxford, the University of Toronto, and the University of Pennsylvania, among others. She was the Viterbi Visiting Assistant Professor in Mediterranean Jewish Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. While at Rutgers, Francesconi will teach the courses “Jewish-Christian Relations through the Ages” and “History of Jewish Art.”

Corinna Kaiser (Spring 2011)

Dr. Norman and Syril Reitman Visiting Scholar—Spring 2011

Corinna Ruth Kaiser received her Ph.D. in 2007 from Heinrich-Heine University of Düsseldorf in Germany, preparing the dissertation “‘Music: Soon to Be the Only Art Form Where Speaking Is Allowed.’ Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Silence as Instruments of Fin de Siècle’s German-Jewish Language Skepticism.” She has been a Leverhulme Research Fellow in Judaism at the Oriental Institute of the University of Oxford, as well as a fellow and lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Justus-Liebig University of Giessen in Germany. Her areas of expertise include Jewish culture and Jews in popular culture, ritual studies, media studies, Jewish life during the Holocaust, and Holocaust memory. She is coeditor of the English edition of The Jews in the Secret Nazi Reports on Popular Opinion in Germany, 1933–1945 (Yale University Press, 2010). Kaiser is also the author of The Word Turned into Moses’ Staff: Gustav Landauer as a Jewish Skeptic of Language and Poet (Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 2010, in German). At Rutgers, Kaiser will teach the course “The Passover Seder and Its Contemporary Reinterpretations.”