Staff

Dror

Prof. Dror Wahrman

ACADEMIC DIRECTOR
dror.wahrman@mail.huji.ac.il
Room 320

I am a cultural historian of Western Europe in a global context in the transition from the pre-modern to the modern, with a focus on the "long" eighteenth century. Much of my work tries to understand what the terms in the previous sentence actually mean.What are the meanings and characteristics of modernity? How distant are we from our "pre-modern" or "early-modern" ancestors? How does “the global” affect European developments during this period? In my work I try to take apart and then put together again some key narratives that the modern west tells about itself.

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My first book (Imagining the Middle Class, 1995) was about the rise of class society and especially the middle class; and the second (The Making of the Modern Self, 2004), about the emergence of the modern individual or modern self. In both cases I asked where do these narratives come from and what in fact were the historical developments that stood behind them (which were not at all those they claimed to represent). A third narrative which I tried to take apart in a book co-authored with Professor Jonathan Sheehan (University of California-Berkeley), is that of European secularization. The book, titled Invisible Hands: Self Organization and the Eighteenth Century, asks where does order and harmony come from, in a world where God is no longer believed to take active care of it itself.

Subsequently my work, which had moved from a focus on Britain to much of Europe, especially France, Holland, Venice and Germany, has gravitated to the interface between art and history, asking how to include works of art – visual art and decorative art – in the archive of the historian. This resulted in a book on a mysterious Dutch painter and the print revolution (Mr. Collier's Letter Racks: A Tale of Art and Illusion at the Threshold of the Modern Information Age, 2012), and in a recent book-length interpretation of one of the most extraordinary decorative art works in early modern Europe, that led me from the politics of the Holy Roman Empire through the art of miniaturization to a comparative-religion theories of the global spread of religions and language: The Throne of the Great Mogul in Dresden: The Ultimate Artwork of the Baroque (2023). Currently I am completing a book with Dr. Ray Schrire of Tel Aviv University about an image that was born in an eighteenth-century French painting and ended up as an extraordinarily interesting Meissen figurine; and I’m beginning a new research group, supported by an ISF Breakthrough Grant, on global aspects of early modern absolutism and capitalism with a focus on the study of objects. Recently I have been honored with this kind of work acknowledged with the Rothschild Prize for the Humanities (2026).

In addition, I have a separate interest in the history of Palestine since the eighteenth century, especially y Jerusalem and Jaffa (with a focus on the peculiar history of Jaffa Oranges), and of photography in the Middle East.

Institutionally, I spent many years teaching in the US and the UK, during which I was the associate editor of the American Historical Review (2000-2003), and the founder-director of the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington. In Israel I served as dean of humanities at the Hebrew University (2014-2018) and as president of the Academic College of Tel Aviv Yaffo (2020-2024).

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RAZ

Prof. Raz Chen-Morris

FORMER DIRECTOR
raz.chen-morris@mail.huji.ac.il

Raz Chen-Morris holds an M.A. (cum laude, in the history of medieval and Renaissance science) and a Ph.D. (2001) from Tel Aviv University. Throughout his studies Chen-Morris taught at several high schools and colleges, among them IASA High School in Jerusalem, The Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, and Seminar Hakibbutzim. For From 2003-2014 he was a senior lecturer at the STS graduate program at Bar Ilan University. Today Chen-Morris is an associate professor in the History department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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He has published widely on Renaissance science, concentrating on Kepler’s optics. His major publications to date are: Measuring Shadows: Kepler's Optics of Invisibility ((University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2016). With Ofer Gal, Baroque Science ((Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013).  Together with Ofer Gal he edited Science in the Age of Baroque, International Archives of the History of Ideas, Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 2012. Together with Hanan Yoran and Gur Zak, he edited a special issue of The European Legacy, (20:5, 2015) on  Humanism and the Ambiguities of Modernity.

Among his publications, one can note:  “Optics, Imagination, and the Construction of Scientific Observation in Kepler’s New Science”, The Monist (2001); “Shadows of Instruction: Optics and Classical Authorities in Kepler’s Somnium”, Journal for the History of Ideas (2005); “From Emblems to Diagrams: Kepler’s New Pictorial Language of Scientific Representation”, Renaissance Quarterly (2009); (With Ofer Gal) “Baroque Optics and the Disappearance of the Observer: From Kepler’s Optics to Descartes’ Doubt”,  Journal of the History of Ideas (2010); with Rivka Feldhay, "Framing the Appearances in the Fifteenth Century: Alberti, Cusa, Regiomontanus, and Copernicus" (2017); and more recently "Geometry and the Making of Utopian Knowledge in Early Modern Europe", in Nuncius 35:2 (forthcoming September, 2020).  

Currently his research is entitled “Geometry and the Making of Utopian Knowledge in Early Modern Europe”. The aim of this research project is to investigate the relationship of knowledge and especially practices of knowledge, Renaissance and Baroque poetics and political power in the crucial early stages of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. This research project is supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant No. 312/20)

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Yigal Bronner

Prof. Yigal Bronner

FORMER DIRECTOR
yigal.bronner@mail.huji.ac.il

Yigal Bronner is an Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He teaches and writes about Sanskrit poetry and poetic theory and South Asian intellectual history. He is the author of Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration (Columbia University Press, 2010) and many articles, including ones on poets and thinkers from the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent and the historiographical tradition of Kashmir in the far north.
He is also the coauthor or coeditor of several other books, including Innovations and Turning Points: Toward a History of Kāvya Literature (with David Shulman and Gary Tubb; Oxford University Press, 2014).

prof._ruth_hacohen

Prof. Ruth HaCohen

FORMER DIRECTOR

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.

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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.

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prof._david_shulman

Prof. David Shulman

FORMER DIRECTOR

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.