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Faculty

Chair

Magda Teter

Jeremy Zwelling Professor of Jewish StudiesShow Bio and Photo

Jeremy Zwelling Professor of Jewish Studies
860-685-5356

Professor of History
222 Church Street 203
860-685-5356

Chair, Medieval Studies Program

Professor, Medieval Studies
860-685-5356

Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
860-685-5356

mteter@wesleyan.edu

MA Warsaw University
MA Columbia University
MPHIL Columbia University
PHD Columbia University

Fall 2011

COL409 - 30
Senior Thesis Tutorial

FGSS409 - 07
Senior Thesis Tutorial

HIST157 - 01
Soph. Sem.:History of the Book

HIST248 - 01
Jewish History Modern

HIST409 - 19
Senior Thesis Tutorial

Spring 2012

FGSS410 - 08
Senior Thesis Tutorial

FGSS420 - 01
Student Forum

HIST202 - 01
Early Modern Europe

HIST410 - 04
Senior Thesis Tutorial

RELI396 - 01
Performing Jewish Studies

Personal Homepage:
http://mteter.web.wesleyan.edu

Office Hours:
Spring 2012: Wednesdays 10-12 and Thursdays 2:30-4.

Research Interests:
As a scholar of Jewish history, eastern European history, and of early modern religious and cultural history, I specialize in Jewish-Christian relations. My first book, Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post Reformation Era, published by Cambridge University Press in 2006 (pbk, 2009), challenges the perception that the Catholic Church triumphed in Poland and demonstrates the superficiality of the re-Catholicization of the ruling elites, whose economic interests trumped their religious loyalties. My new book, Sinners on Trial: Jews and Sacrilege after the Reformation (Harvard University Press, 2011) tells a story of affirmation of Catholic dogmas after the Reformation, not necessarily though religious education and propaganda but through the application of criminal law, and the courts' treatment of "the sacred" and, thus, also of the "sacrilege." The book addresses one of the most notorious examples of "sacrilege" -- the accusation that Jews desecrated consecrated communion wafers. "Sinners on Trial" combines political, legal, and cultural historical approaches. Far more than the Church's efforts to educate the laity, the lay courts' classification of Catholic spaces as the only "sacred spaces" and their adjudication of crimes of "sacrilege," were crucial for the (re)Catholicisation of Poland, and the shaping of the country's religious identity. "Sinners on Trial" crucially casts a new light on the most infamous case of sacrilege, the accusations against Jews for stealing and desecrating the host, situating it within a broader context of the politics of crime -- most specifically that of sacrilege, illuminating its post-Reformation character.

Scholarly Keywords:
Early modern history, Jewish history, Poland, religious history, gender, eastern Europe, historiography

Academic Associations:
Association for Jewish Studies, American Historical Association, Sixteenth Century Studies, American Catholic Historical Association, Church History, AAUP

Lab URL:
http://www.earlymodern.org

Publications:
http://mteter.web.wesleyan.edu/mteter_publications.htm

RECENT PUBLICATIONS Books: Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post-Reformation Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006; pbk 2009) Coedited with Adam Teller, Polin: Social and Cultural Boundaries in Pre-Modern Poland, vol. 22, (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010, released Nov. 2009) Sinners on Trial: Jews and Sacrilege after the Reformation (Harvard University Press, Spring 2011). Articles: "'There Should Be No Love between Us and Them': Social Life and the Bounds of Jewish and Canon Law in Early Modern Poland," in Polin: Social and Cultural Boundaries in Early Modern Poland, eds. Adam Teller and Magda Teter (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2009), 249-70. Co-authored with Adam Teller, "Introduction: Borders and Boundaries in the Historiography of the Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth," in Polin: Social and Cultural Boundaries in Early Modern Poland, eds. Adam Teller and Magda Teter (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2009), 3-46. "Crime and Sacred Spaces in Early Modern Poland," a chapter in a book Kommunikation durch symbolische Akte. Religivse Heterogenitdt und politische Herrschaft in Polen-Litauen [Communication through symbolic acts. Religious heterogeneity and political Rule in Poland-Lithuania], ed. Yvonne Kleimann (Franz Steiner Verlag: Stuttgart, Germany, 2010), 171-90. "Ritual Murder Accusation," in The Cambridge Dictionary of Jewish Religion, History, and Culture edited by Judith Baskin (forthcoming, 1160 words) Co-authored with Debra Kaplan (Yeshiva University), "Out of the (Historiographic) Ghetto: Methodological Remarks on Jews in Early Modern Europe," in Sixteenth Century Journal 40 no. 2 (2009): 365-93. The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Gershon Hundert: articles: "Conversions," "The Ezofowicz Family," "Ger Zedek," "The Helicz Family" (with Edward Fram), "Judaizers," "Katarzyna Malcherowa Weigel" (New Haven: Yale University Press, in 2008), 489, 348-351, 590-91, 710-11, 834-35, 2011-12. "Negotiating the internal and the external, or on the contextualization of pre-modern Ashkenazi Jewry," Review essay on Joseph M. Davis, Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller: Portrait of a Seventeenth Century Rabbi, in Jewish History 21 no.? (2007): 217-32. With Edward Fram, "Apostasy, Fraud and the Beginnings of Hebrew Printing in Cracow," AJS Review 30 no. 1 (2006): 31-66 "The Legend of Ger Zedek (Righteous Convert) of Wilno as Polemic and Reassurance," AJS Review 29 no. 2 (2005): 237-63 With Edward Fram, "Matai nosad ha-defus ha-`ivri be-Qraqov?" [Hebrew: When Did Hebrew Printing Begin in Cracow?], Gal-`Ed 20 (2005): 144-49 "Kilka uwag na temat podzia&#322;sw spo&#322;ecznych i religijnych pomi&#281;dzy &#379;ydami i Chrze&#347;cijanami we wschodnich miastach dawnej Rzeczpospolitej" [Polish: Some Remarks on the Social and Religious Divisions between Jews and Christians in Eastern Towns of Premodern Poland], Kwartalnik Historii &#379;ydsw [Quarterly of Jewish History, Warsaw, Poland] 207 no. 3 (September, 2003): 327-36 "Jewish Conversions to Catholicism in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," Jewish History 17 no. 3 (2003): 257-83

Faculty

Jane Alden

Associate Professor of MusicShow Bio and Photo

Michael Armstrong Roche

Associate Professor of Romance Languages & LiteraturesShow Bio and Photo

Associate Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures
300 High Street 206
860-685-3128

Associate Professor, Medieval Studies
860-685-3128

marmstrong@wesleyan.edu

BA Harvard University
MA Harvard University
PHD Harvard University

Office Hours:
Fall-Spring 2011-2012: I am in Madrid serving as Director of the Wesleyan study abroad program. I will use my Wesleyan email address throughout (marmstrong@wesleyan.edu).

Research Interests:
My recent scholarship has been focused primarily on what are often called Cervantes's "other works," those relatively neglected novels (La Galatea, Persiles), novellas, and plays that tend to get overlooked in the long shadow cast by Don Quijote. A book called Cervantes' Epic Novel: Empire, Religion, and the Dream Life of Heroes in 'Persiles' (U of Toronto P, 2009) reads Cervantes's final novel in several contexts: it links Persiles's narrative art to the major political, religious, social, and literary debates of late 16th- and early 17th-century Spain, as well as to the verse and prose epic traditions represented primarily by Homer, Vergil, Heliodorus, and Tasso. In that book I set out to show that Persiles is epic not only in its formal and ideological ambition but also in its aspiration to embrace all of the author himself--including the overriding desire to entertain. For several years now I have been at work on a book provisionally entitled Cervantes Plays: Ironies of History on the Early Modern Stage. It takes a close look at Cervantes's full-length plays and their imaginative, often experimental, and still-compelling dramatic engagement with key historical debates about Habsburg political mythmaking, Algerian captivity, the gypsy community, the rise of the commercial stage, marriage choice, and women's work. This book has emerged from the Theater Without Borders research collaborative, a group committed to exploring the international and comparative impact of early modern drama, especially--but not exclusively--of England, Spain, Italy, and France (see our website at www.nyu.edu/projects/theaterwithoutborders/index.html). Earlier I was contributing author to the scholarly catalogue that accompanied an exhibition I helped organize called Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment, which could be seen at the Prado, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum in NYC (1988-1989). Throughout, I have tried to practice a kind of scholarship that moves fluidly from text to context and back again (reading the text with and against the pressures of the moment and then reading that moment through the lens of the text); that draws on close reading in multiple disciplines (history of literature and art, comparative literature, genre theory, political, social, and economic history, history of ideas and philosophy, theology and religious history, and jurisprudence); and that is informed by textual, historical, and theoretical approaches to literature. Finally, I have looked for ways to bring my scholarly interests to a wider audience, serving--for instance--as general editor of three Let's Go travel guides (Let's Go France 1986, Let's Go California and the Pacific Northwest 1986, and Let's Go Spain & Portugal 1992).

Scholarly Keywords:
Cervantes; Spanish classical theater; Spanish and Latin American poetry; medieval and early modern Spanish literature and history (including Latin American colonial, transatlantic, and global perspectives); comparative literature and history (classical, medieval, and early modern European primarily); 16th- and 17th-century New World conquest texts (chronicle and history, jurisprudence, ethnography); Goya

Clark Maines

Kenan Professor of the HumanitiesShow Bio and Photo

Howard Needler

Professor of LettersShow Bio

Ruth Nisse

Associate Professor of EnglishShow Bio

Laurie Nussdorfer

Professor of HistoryShow Bio and Photo

Michael Roberts

Robert Rich Professor of LatinShow Bio and Photo

Gary Shaw

Dean of the Social Sciences and Interdisciplinary ProgramsShow Bio and Photo