Faculty

 

Henry Bial (American Studies and Theatre) Henry Bial is currently Chair of the American Studies Department as well as a professor of Theatre. His research and teaching specialties include Jewish popular culture, religious performance, and theatre historiography. He holds a PhD in Performance Studies from New York University and a BA in Folklore and Mythology from Harvard University. Dr. Bial is the author of Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (University of Michigan Press, 2005), the editor of The Performance Studies Reader (Routledge, 2004; Second Edition, 2007), and the co-editor of Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions (with Scott Magelssen, University of Michigan Press, 2010) and Brecht Sourcebook (with Carol Martin, Routledge, 2000). He has published essays in TDR, Theatre Topics, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and elsewhere. He serves on the editorial boards of Theatre Topics, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and Ecumenica.

In addition to his scholarly pursuits, Dr. Bial has worked in a variety of capacities -- director, performer, designer, playwright, dramaturg, and lighting operator -- in university and professional theatres in New York, Kansas City, Boston, Minneapolis, and Albuquerque. A proud member of the Buran Theatre Company, he was last seen on stage as The Man in the Purple Suit in The House of Fitzcarraldo at the 2010 Kansas City Fringe Festival. Dr. Bial is President-Elect of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), a comprehensive non-profit professional membership organization. The Association's web site is www.athe.org.

Office: 213 Bailey, 864-4011, hbial@ku.edu

Lynn Davidman (Sociology) Lynn Davidman joined the KU faculty as the Beren Distinguished Professor of Modern Jewish Studies in the Fall semester of 2008. Dr. Davidman received her Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1986. She has published three books with major university presses: Tradition in a Rootless World (University of California Press, 1991), which won a National Jewish Book Award; Motherloss (University of Calif Press, 2000); and Feminist Perspectives in Jewish Studies (Yale, 2004), co-edited with Shelly Tenenbaum. Her research has appeared in a variety of prestigious journals such as Sociology of Religion and Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. Lynn serves on the advisory board of the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University and is a member of the editorial board for Qualitative Sociology. She came to KU from Brown University, where she was a professor of Judaic studies, American civilization and gender studies.

Joseph E. Steinmetz, former Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, praised Dr. Davidman as "a foremost scholar in modern Jewish studies whose work intersects the disciplines of sociology, religious studies, Jewish studies, women and gender studies, and race, religion and ethnicity." Her vision is instrumental to the development of transdisciplinary tracks in sociology of religion, women and gender at the graduate and undergraduate levels.

Office: 740 Fraser Hall, (785) 864-9412, lynndavidman@ku.edu

Tamara Leah Falicov (Film and Media Studies)Associate professor of film studies and has worked at the KU since 1998. Dr. Falicov received her doctorate in Communication from UC San Diego, where she wrote a dissertation on state cultural policy in relation to the contemporary film industry in Argentina. She also received a degree in sociology from UC Berkeley. She received a Fulbright student research award to study the film industry in Buenos Aires, Argentina during the 1997-98 academic year. Professor Falicov's specialty is Latin American Cinema, with particular focus on the film histories of Argentina and Cuba. Her research has appeared in the following journals: Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, Southern Quarterly, Canadian Journal of Communication, Media, Culture, and Society, Framework, and Film and History. She has authored a chapter on Argentine blockbuster movies for the anthology Movie Blockbusters, edited by Julian Stringer (Routledge, 2003).

Office: Department of Film and Media Studies, 224 Oldfather Studios, (785) 864-1353, tfalicov@ku.edu

Cheryl Lester (English and American Studies) is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Kansas. Informed by the experience of growing up in post-war Detroit, she teaches and researches migration, immigration, and diaspora, particularly as they figure in 19th-and early 20th-century southern, African American, and Jewish literature in the US. She has primarily published on literary texts that contribute to the cultural construction of southern and black migration over a 40-year period (1915-60), particularly as this large-scale demographic change transformed southern identities, racial formations, and segregated spaces in the US South. Her research on the cultural construction of internal migration in southern and African American literature also led to her interest in cultural constructions of Jewish families in the diaspora after the Holocaust and particularly of tropes of aging in the context of cultural survival. She has recently joined a working group at KU to study and teach cultural constructions of aging, as nearly 80 million Baby Boomers reach the age of retirement over the next 20 years. She has taught literary constructions of incalculable change in the contexts of migration, immigration, and the Holocaust in courses on American literature, American studies, southern literature, William Faulkner, the Great Migration, African American literature, and Jewish American literature. For a list of selected publications and awards, see http://www.english.ku.edu/people/lester-cheryl/index.shtml.

Office: chlester@ku.edu

Renee Perelmutter, (Slavic Languages and Literatures Department) Dr. Perelmutter completed her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley and joined KU as an Assistant Professor in \ 2008 semester. Her teaching and research interests are Yiddish and Slavic morphosyntax and pragmatics, general and Jewish folklore, and Jewish culture. Her recent publications include an edited volume [with Viktoria Hasko], New Approaches to Slavic Verbs of Motion. Studies in Language Companion Series, vol. 115 (2010); a chapter in this book, "Verbs of Motion Under Negation in Modern Russian, " "Pragmatic Functions of Reported Speech with jako in the Old Russian Primary Chronicle." Journal of Historical Pragmatics 10 (1) (2009), 108—131; and "The Language of Dream Reports and Dostoevsky's The Double," Slavic and East European Journal 52/1 (2008).

Office: 2127 Wescoe, (785) 864-3313, rperel@ku.edu

Rebecca Rovit (Department of Theatre) Assistant Professor, earned her Ph.D. in Theatre History from Florida State University and an M.A. in German language and literature from the University of Virginia, with a focus on drama. Her teaching interests are theatre history; script analysis; modern European drama; German theatre in the Unified Germany; theatre and the Holocaust: Jewish artistic production in Nazi Germany. Her research explores the cultural heritage of the Holocaust (1933-1945), including art produced by prisoner-artists in situ and the role of the performing arts under duress: within Germany's Third Reich, and in ghetto and camp settings. She co-edited (with Alvin Goldfarb) Theatrical Performance during the Holocaust: Texts, Documents, Memoirs (1999), a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Her forthcoming micro-history on the Jewish Kulturbund theatre and its repertoire in Nazi Germany, A Jewish Theatre Company in Nazi Berlin, 1933-1941, is in press with Iowa University Press (Studies in Theatre History and Culture).

Office: Department of Theatre, Murphy Hall, Fax: (785) 864-5251, rrovit@ku.edu

Hagith Sivan, (History) Hagith Sivan received her Ph.D. from Columbia abd M.A. from Yale. Dr. Sivan specializes in Ancient history, Roman history, early Christianity, late antiquity, early medieval history, Judaica, and women in antiquity. She is the author of Ausoniue of Bordeaus: Genesis of a Gallic Aristocracy (1993); Between Woman, Man and God: A New Interpretation of the Ten Commandments (2004); and Palestine in Late Antiquity (2008).

Office: 3644 Wescoe, (785) 864-9466, dinah01@ku.edu

Molly Zahn, (Religious Studies) Molly Zahn received her PhD from the University of Notre Dame in 2009, and has also studied in Minnesota, Oxford (England), Tübingen (Germany), and Uppsala (Sweden). Her areas of interest include the Hebrew Bible, the ancient Near Eastern world, early Judaism (especially the Dead Sea Scrolls), early Christianity, and the historical relations between Christianity and Judaism. Her research focuses on the issue of interpretation: how religious communities read and renew their sacred traditions in light of their own experiences and circumstances. She has published several articles on scriptural interpretation in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in later layers of the Hebrew Bible. Her book Rethinking Rewritten Scripture: Composition and Exegesis in the 4QReworked Pentateuch Manuscripts, is forthcoming from Brill.

Office: 105 Smith Hall, (785) 864-1141, mzahn@ku.edu

Lecturers

M. J. McLendon (English) A Senior Lecturer, earned her B.A. at Luther College (1979), M.A. at University of Northern Iowa (1983), and PhD KU (1991). Dr. McLendon teaches Holocaust literature and American literature. She is a member of Holocaust Education Academic Round Table (H.E.A.R.T.), Midwest Center for Holocaust Education, and leads a Holocaust literature book discussion monthly at the Jewish Community Center.

Office: 3024 Wescoe Hall, (785) 864-2539, mjm@ku.edu

Rabbi Neal Schuster (MA, JE; MA, HL) Rabbi Schuster is the Senior Jewish Educator at KU Hillel and a lecturer in the KU Jewish Studies Program. He has taught courses on a wide array of topics including the bible, Jewish History, Theology and Philosophy.

Office: 4024 Wescoe, (785) 864-6245, schuster@kuhillel.org