ACADEMIC COMMITTEE

Prof. Ilit Ferber teaches philosophy at Tel-Aviv University.

Her research focuses on the philosophy of emotions, especially melancholy, suffering and pain, from the perspective of language. Ilit has published articles on Leibniz, Herder, Freud, Benjamin, Heidegger, Scholem and Améry. She has also co-edited a book on the role of moods in philosophy, and two books, in English and Hebrew, on lament in Gershom Scholem’s thought.Ferber's book Philosophy and Melancholy: Benjamin's Early Reflections on Theater and Language (Stanford University Press in 2013) explores the role of melancholy in Benjamin's early writings and discusses the relationship between Benjamin, Freud and Leibniz. Her second book Language Pangs: On Pain and the Origin of Language (Oxford University Press, 2019 and in German translation: Neofelis, 2023) explores the role of pain in Herder's theory of the origin of language, Heidegger's seminar about Herder, and Sophocles’ "Philoctetes”. She is now working on Jean Améry’s philosophy of temporality.

For Papers and more information see: https://www.ilitferber.com/

Ludwig Rosenberger Distinguished Service Professor in Jewish History, Music and the Humanities in the College; Associate Faculty, Divinity School

Milette Shamir is associate professor in the department of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University.  Her research focuses on U.S. literature and culture in the nineteenth century.  She is the author of Inexpressible Privacy: The Interior Life of Antebellum American Literature (Penn University Press, 2005) and the editor of Boys Don't Cry? Rethinking Narratives of Masculinity and Emotion in the US (with Jennifer Travis, Columbia University Press, 2002). Her most recent edited collection, Bigger than Ben-Hur: The Novel, Its Adaptations, and their Audiences (with Barbara Ryan, Syracuse University Press, 2015), is an offshoot of her monograph on American Holy-Land Narratives and the modernization of U.S. cultural forms during the long nineteenth century.  Her work appears regularly in journals and essay collections devoted to the study of American literature and cultural history.

Professor Shamir earned her PhD from Brandeis University.  She was a visiting scholar at Duke University, at the University of Texas, Austin, and at NYU. She is the editor-in-chief of the journal Poetics Today (with Irene Tucker). She co-founded TAU's American Studies program in 2006, and served as its head for thirteen years. She also served as chair of the Department of English and American Studies from 2006 to 2009 and as Vice Dean of the Humanities from 2015-2019.  In 2012 she founded TAU’s pioneering undergraduate program for international students--the BA in Liberal Arts—and served as its academic director until 2016.  From the Fall of 2020 she is TAU's Vice President for International Affairs.

Ingrid Baumgärtner has been Professor of Medieval History at the University of Kassel since 1994. She previously taught at the University of Augsburg (1983–1992) and was a Heisenberg Fellow of the DFG and Visiting Scholar in Princeton, Stanford, and at the Villa I Tatti in Florence. She served as vice-president of the Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani, as faculty dean at Kassel University, and as a member of the presiding committee and scientific board of the Mediävistenverband. Her publications explore medieval canon law and Roman law, the city of Rome, gender and women’s history as well as social space, cartography, and travel reports. Geographically, her focus is on Germany, Italy, and the Mediterranean world. Her latest book discusses the sixteenth-century cartographer Battista Agnese (WBG 2017).

Eitan Wilf is a cultural and semiotic anthropologist whose research interests focus on the institutional transformations of creative practice in the United States. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork on the institutionalization of jazz music in academic programs, the development of art-producing computerized algorithms and sociable robots, and routinized business innovation. He is the author of School for Cool: The Academic Jazz Program and the Paradox of Institutionalized Creativity (University of Chicago Press, 2014), andCreativity on Demand: The Dilemmas of Innovation in an Accelerated Age (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Wilf holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago. 

Ruth HaCohen (Pinczower), born in Jerusalem, is the Artur Rubinstein Professor of Musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and since 2013 the Head of the School of the Arts there and since April 2014 also the Director of the Martin Buber Society of Fellows in the Humanities and Social Sciences. She is the 2012 winner of the Otto Kinkeldey Award by the American Musicological Society for the most distinguished book in musicology *The Music Libel Against the Jews * (Yale 2011) and the first Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality in the Humanistic Disciplines for the same book.

She is a member of the Steering Committee of the Balzan Research Project: “Towards a global history of music” (Director: Prof. Reinhard Strohm) and in the Advisory Committee of the Polyphony Foundation in Nazareth (organization whose purpose is to bridge the divide between Arab and Jewish communities in Israel by creating a common ground where young people come together around classical music).
Ruth HaCohen graduated in musicology and Jewish thought and received her PhD in Musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1992). She is the author of books and articles that explicate the role played by music in shaping and reflecting wider cultural and political contexts and processes. Her points of departure are historical, aesthetic and semiotic, deploying as well theories from psychology, anthropology and critical thought. Her interpretative approach is comparative, referring to literary and visual art forms, viewing her subject matters in relation especially to religions, secularization and ideational and cultural trends. Her work extends from baroque music to modern one, with a special emphasis on opera, oratorio, and song, dealing also with the relations between Ashkenazi-Jewish and Christian music. Among subjects she has investigated are the cultural uses of “noise” and “harmony”; strategies of signification in baroque and classical music and in Wagner’s work; the rise of Sympathy as a cultural paradigm in baroque music and theory and its later repercussions. She also wrote about poetic and religious layers in Israeli folk song, and on various aspects in Arnold Schoenberg’s work.
Her recent publications include:

• The Music Libel Against the Jews by Yale University Press 2011 ( http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300167788 )
• Tuning the Mind: Connecting Aesthetic Theory to Cognitive Science (Transaction, 2003 with Ruth Katz; "Between Noise and Harmony: The Oratorical Moment in the Musical Entanglements of Jews and Christians" (Critical Inquiry 2006).
• She had recently completed the book *Composing Power, Singing Freedom: Overt and Covert Connections between Music and Politics in the West*, submitted to Van Leer and Hakibutz Hameuchad, in Hebrew (with Yaron Ezrahi).

Ruth HaCohen was the Chair of the Department during 2001-4 and again during 2012-13, and the Head of the PhD Honors Program in the Humanities during 2008-9. She has lectured in numerous national and international conferences and institutes including UNAM, México City; Duke, Princeton and Johns Hopkins University; Einstein Forum, Potsdam; the University of Oxford, Vienna, Amsterdam and others. Ruth HaCohen was a visiting scholar as St. John College Oxford, in 1996-7 and a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2004-5. She was invited as a distinguished scholar to Brown Humanity Center in Spring 2008, and was a guest professor at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin in Summer 2009. Between 2008-2011 she belonged as a Senior Fellow to the research group “The Interpretive Imagination: Connections between Religion and Art in Jewish Culture in its Contexts” at Scholion, Interdisciplinary Research Center in Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University. During 2011-12 she stayed as a visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and was granted a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio.

Rahel Jaeggi is a Professor for Practical Philosophy and Social Philosophy at the Humboldt University of Berlin. She taught as a Theodor Heuss Professor at the New School for Social Research in New York during the academic year of 2015/16. Rahel Jaeggi’s research areas are in Social Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Ethics, Philosophical Anthropology, Social Ontology, Critical Theory and the enhancement of Critical Theory (in a broad sense).

Publications inter alia:

Kritik von Lebensformen (Critique of Forms of Life/English translation forthcoming), Frankfurt/M. 2013; Entfremdung. Zur Aktualität eines sozialphilosophischen Problems, Frankfurt/ M. 2006 (Translation: Alienation, New York 2014); Welt und Person – Zum anthropologischen Hintergrund der Gesellschaftskritik Hannah Arendts (World and Person – On the Anthropological Background of Hannah Arendt's Social Critique), Berlin 1997; Sozialphilosophie. Eine Einführung (Social Philosophy. An Introduction), co-authored with Robin Celikates, Munich 2017; Nach Marx: Philosophie, Kritik, Praxis (After Marx: Philosophy, Critique, Practice), co-edited with Daniel Loick, Frankfurt/M. 2013; Sozialphilosophie und Kritik. (Social Philosophy and Critique), co-edited with Rainer Forst, Martin Hartmann and Martin Saar, Frankfurt/ M. 2009; Was ist Kritik? (What is Critique?), co-edited with Tilo Wesche, Frankfurt/M. 2009.

Zur Shalev completed his studies at Princeton University (history, 2004). Since 2005/6 he teaches at the General History and Land of Israel Studies departments of the University of Haifa. He specialize in early modern European cultural and intellectual history, with particular interest in geographical and religious thought and Oriental scholarship. Currently he works on geographical Hebraism: an attempt to understand the reception of medieval geographical Hebrew texts in early modern Christian Europe. Another project is focused on the tradition of learned travel to the Levant in the 17th and 18th centuries, thereby tracing the real and perceived geographical boundaries of the European Republic of Letters. At the University of Haifa he convenes the Medieval-Renaissance seminar and runs the innovative teaching program Nofei Yeda (Landscapes of Knowledge).

His published research includes Sacred Words and Worlds (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Ptolemy's Geography in the Renaissance, co-edited with Charles Burnett (London: Warburg Institute, 2011); “The Travel Notebooks of John Greaves,” in The Republic of Letters and the Levant, ed. A. Hamilton et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2005), pp. 77-102; "Benjamin of Tudela, Spanish Explorer," Mediterranean Historical Review 25, no. 1 (2010): 17-33.; “Measurer of All Things: John Greaves (1602-1652), the Great Pyramid, and Early Modern Metrology,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63, no. 4 (2002): 555-575.

Elena Esposito is Professor of Sociology at the University Bielefeld and the University of Bologna. She published many works on the theory of social systems, media theory, memory theory and sociology of financial markets. Her current research on algorithmic prediction is supported by a five-year Advanced Grant from the European Research Council.

Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and Permanent Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Her recent publications include Against Nature (2019), Science in the Archives (2017),  (co-edited with Elizabeth Lunbeck), Histories of Scientific Observation (2011), and (with Paul Erikson et al.) and How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (2014) as well as many essays on the history of  scientific facts, objectivity, curiosity, and probability.

Joseph Zeira is a professor of Economics in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also has a part time position in LUISS Guido Carli in Rome. Joseph Zeira is a macroeconomist, who specializes in a number of areas: technology and economic growth, the role of income distribution in macroeconomics, money and liquidity, business cycles, and the economy of Israel.

In addition to academic research and teaching Joseph Zeira has been involved in a number of professional activities. Joseph Zeira is an active member of AIX, a group of Israeli, Palestinian, and Internationals, who study the economic aspects of potential peace agreements between Israel and Palestine. In 2011 Joseph Zeira headed a team of economists that supported the Israeli protest movement. In 2014 he was a member of a government committee for reducing poverty in Israel.

Wolfgang Seibel is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Konstanz, Germany, and an Adjunct Professor at the Hertie School of Governance, Berlin. He is a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Science and of the Commission histoire of the Fondation pour la mémoire de la Shoah, Paris. His recent research focuses on international organizations, occupation regimes, and organizational hybridity. His latest publications are “Studying Hybridity: Sectors and Mechanisms” (Organizations Studies, 2015) and “Negotiated Mass Crime. The Germans in France and the ‘Final Solution’, 1940-1944” (The University of Michigan Press, Spring 2015).

Maria Mavroudi is Professor of Byzantine History and Classics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the contacts between Byzantium and the Arabs, the medieval reception of ancient Greek learning in the Byzantine and the Islamic worlds, and the history of Byzantine science.

Amit Pinchevski is a professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, where he has been teaching since 2004, after completing his doctoral research at McGill University, Canada. His research interests are in philosophy of communication and media theory, focusing specifically on the ethical aspects of the limits of communication, media as means of witnessing and memory, and pathologies of communication and their construction. In 2008 he was elected as a member of the Young Scholars Forum in the Humanities and Social Sciences of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Between 2011-2015 he served as vice-chair and chair of the Philosophy, Theory and Critique Division of the International Communication Association.

President of the American Academy in Berlin. He is the Barnaby Conrad and Mary Critchfield Keeney Professor of History, and Professor of Music and German Studies at Brown University. He previously served as Vice Provost for the Arts and Founding Director of the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown and as dramaturg on a joint production of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung for the Berlin State Opera and the Teatro alla Scala, Milan. In 2015-16 a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Educated at Princeton University and the University of Chicago, he has been a visiting professor at these two schools as well as at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and National Tsing-hua University in Taiwan. Principal research interests include the cultural history of modern Germany and Austria with particular attention to German Jewish intellectual history and the cultural history of music.

Prof. David Shulman's research interest are Indian poetics, live Sanskrit theater, the Renascence in South India in the 16-17 centuries and the Islam in south India and the Carnatic classic music.ilingual in Hebrew and English, he has mastered Sanskrit, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu, and reads Greek, Russian, French, German, Persian, Arabic and Malayalam. He has authored or co-authored more than 20 books on various subjects ranging from temple myths and temple poems to essays that cover the wide spectrum of the cultural history of South India. Prof. Shulman is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.