NEWS

We are delighted to present the elected fellows for the academic year 2021/22!

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14 June, 2021

Yael Fisch (Jewish Studies)
Erez Maggor (Sociology)
Idit Ben Or (History)
Yuval Tal (History)
Limor Yungman (L’Institut des mondes africains -IMAF)

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Carolin Mueller (Cultural Studies)
Christopher Roser (Philosophy)
Katharina Palmberger (Byzantine History of Art)
Patrick Dürr (Philosophy)
Jasmin Bleimling (Psychology)

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Buber Fellow Hannelies Koloska wins an ERC Starting grant

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14 September, 2020

Dr. Hannelies Koloska has won a €1.5 million Euro ERC Starting Grant for her project VISIONIS: Visuality in the Qur'an and Early Islam

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VISIONIS sets out to write a cultural history of vision in Early Islam. It aims to generate a paradigm shift in the understanding of visuality in the transitional period between Late Antiquity and Early Islam. The project argues that the Qur’an is a key locus for our knowledge of the scope of visual strands in the epistemic space of Late Antiquity and the ways in which these visual strands were adapted and transformed by the emerging new religious community of Muslims. It also assumes that Early Islamic exegetical, theological, legal, literary, and historiographic texts and Early Islamic artistic production attest to the heretofore unstudied adjustment, conceptualization, and calibration of the various Qur’anic visual elements in combination with local-temporal trends. The project challenges the text-oriented research on the Qur’an that has prevented scholars from perceiving the work’s entanglement with the visual cultures of Late Antiquity. It also aims to rectify the comparative research of Islamic artwork and Islamic legal statements that resulted in a lack of comprehensive research into the Qur’an and Early Islamic texts as sources for the inquiry of Islamic visual concepts and images. The project will thus improve our understanding of the cultural dynamics of Late Antiquity and Early Islam, will raise awareness of the specificities of Muslim discourses on seeing, enabling an assessment of their historical anchoring, and challenge prevailing misconceptions of Islamic visual cultures.

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We are delighted to present the elected fellows for the academic year 2020/21!

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10 June, 2020

Muzna Awayed-Bishara (Education Policy, Sociolinguistics, English as a Foreign Language)
Beatrice Baragli (Assyriology, Linguistics)
Nora Derbal (Civil Society in Saudi Arabia, History of Orientalism)
Martina Mampieri (Early modern and modern Jewish History)
Ella Elbaz (Comparative Literature, Palestinian and Israeli Literature, Digital Humanity)

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Pierre Christian Fink (Economics, Economic History, Sociology)
Matan Kaminer (Anthropology, Migration, Labor Relations)
Andreas Lehnertz (Medieval Jewish History)
Ido Wachtel (Archeology, Urbanization)
Peter Zilberg (History of Parthian and Persian Empires, Assyriology) 

 

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Daphna Oren-Magidor has been awarded a Gerda Henkel Research Scholarship

Gerda Henkel
4 May, 2020

Buber Alumna Daphna Oren-Magidor has been awarded a Gerda Henkel Research Scholarship for her project “Sisterhood in Early Modern England”. The project, which will culminate in a book, explores the relationships between adult sisters in the seventeenth century, and the roles they played in creating and maintaining kinship networks. 

Zoomeando en Ladino

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17 April, 2020

Just before the Jewish holiday of Passover, the initiative of a Buber Fellow, Ilil Baum, brought together some twenty Ladino speakers to “meet” online and speak, sing, and tell stories in their mother tongue. Ladino, also referred to as Judeo-Spanish, Judezmo, and Spanyolit by its speakers, is an endangered language. According to pessimistic estimates, there are only about 20,000 living competent speakers, and the more optimistic sources believe that there are some 250,000–400,000 speakers, all of whom are Sephardic Jews residing mainly in Israel, the US, and Turkey.

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Whichever estimate we want to believe, the majority of Ladino speakers are in their seventies and eighties, with very few fluent speakers under the age of sixty. Baum’s open class is a first in a series of virtual meetings with the title Zoomeando en Ladino (‘Zooming’ in Ladino) that is meant to ease the acute sense of isolation of the elderly during the COVID-19 crisis. One of the participants, a 70-year-old women, admitted that she normally has no one to speak to in her mother tongue. The class included enthusiastic Ladino speakers whose Sephardic origins are from Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, and Israel, and many of whom video-conferenced for the first time in their life.

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The Buber Society continues to operate during Corona times

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8 April, 2020

The Buber Society continues to operate during Corona times. To the extent that the circumstances permit, our fellows carry on with their research work and are busy writing their papers and grant-applications; our wonderful staff continues to work from home (to the level permitted by university policies); and we maintain our academic and social activities as a group, even if from a distance. One of the innovations of this time is that we now hold our weekly Kaffeestunden through videoconferencing. In this way, we continue to “see” one another and keep in touch and in solidarity. This has worked really well so far, although we certainly look forward to having cake and pastries in the Mandel Building again.

Ping Pong Tournament

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21 January, 2020

 

End of the semester Ping Pong Tournament, Mandel Building 

with our very own Ynon Wygoda and Yigal Bronner at the final!

 

 

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