Naomi Brenner:
Associate professor in the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, served as acting chair for her department for the academic year. This year, she published book chapters titled “Shund and Translation” in Minority Language-World Literature: Yiddish and Translation (de Gruyter, 2024) and “Hebrew and Yiddish: The Language War” in the Routledge Handbook on Zionism (Routledge, 2024). Dr. Brenner continues to serve as co-editor for the digital humanities project Below the Line: The Feuilleton and Modern Jewish Cultures, which features collections of Jewish feuilletons from around the world. She spent summer 2025 as a Resnick fellow at the National Library of Israel, where she researched early 20th-century Hebrew entertainment fiction.
Lúcia Costigan:
Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, received a grant to teach a course at the University of the State of São Paulo, São José do Rio Preto campus. She was also awarded a scholarship from Portugal to conduct research for two months in the archives of Biblioteca Nacional of Portugal in September and October 2025. Dr. Costigan will be investigating the impact of the political and religious conflicts that disrupted the lives of heterodox writers and playwrights during the years of 1640-1668, a period of conflicts and wars between Spain and Portugal that began with the Portuguese revolution of 1640.
Harriet Fertik (Associate Professor, Classics), Ben Folit-Weinberg (Assistant Professor, Classics) and Paul Reitter (Professor, Germanic Languages and Literatures) established a new Humanities Institute-funded working group, "Metaphors of Reception, Reception as a Metaphor" and won a College of Arts and Sciences grant to host a major international conference in 2026.
Harriet Fertik:
Associate professor in the Department of Classics, published the article “W.E.B. Du Bois'sUniversal History in Black Folk Then and Now (1939)” in Classical Receptions Journal 16, no. 4 (2024): 368–386 and a review of Critical Ancient World Studies: The Case for Forgetting Classics edited by Mathura Umachandran and Marchella Ward in American Journal of Philology that considers missed opportunities to engage with Jewish studies in projects that critique the discipline of Classics. Dr. Fertik also gave a talk on “Hannah Arendt’s Ulysses” at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Classical Studies in January.
Ben Folit-Weinberg:
Assistant professor in the Department of Classics, presented invited papers at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Chicago, and Vanderbilt, and will present at a conference in Coimbra, Portugal.
Bert Harrill:
Professor in the Department of History, published two articles this year: “Teacher and Student as Ideal Ascetics in the Astrological Handbook of Vettius Valens” in Discipline, Authority, and Text in Late Antique Religion: Essays in Honour of David Brakke, ed. Ellen Muehlberger and Bradley K. Storin, Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, 43 (Brepols, 2025); and “Ephesians as a Circular Letter: Forms and Functions of a General Address” in Reconsidering the Letter to the Ephesians in Ancient Context, ed. Annette Weissenrieder and Mark Grundeken, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament I, 353 (Mohr Siebeck, 2025). Prof. Harrill also presented the keynote address at the 2025 Colloquium Biblicum Lovaniense at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven/Université Catholique de Louvain in Leuven, Belgium. In addition, Dr. Harrill served as the External Assessor for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada in 2024.
Matt Goldish
Professor in the Department of History and the Samuel M. and Esther Melton Chair in Jewish History, published Science and Specters at Salem (Routledge, 2024). He is currently working on a new project concerning the role of Kabbalah in Jewish law.
Robin Judd
Professor in the Department of History, released Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust both as a paperback edition and an audio book. She presented at two conferences, gave six invited academic lectures, and gave twelve book talks. In June, Robin accompanied a group of Ohio teachers to Krakow as part of a program led by the Ohio Commission for Holocaust and Genocide Education and Memorialization.
Hannah Kosstrin
Associate professor in the Department of Dance and director of the Melton Center for Jewish Studies, presented invited lectures at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of California, Santa Barbara and papers at the annual conferences of the Association for Jewish Studies and Dance Studies Association. She published two book reviews in Journal of Jewish Identities and Contemporary Jewry and joined the editorial boards of Dance Research Journal and Journal of Jewish Identities.
James Moore
Assistant professor in the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, published three articles this year: "The Legality of Persian Period Memoranda," in The Dynamics of Early Judaean Law: Studies in the Diversity of Ancient Social and Communal Legislation, ed. S. Jacobs, BZAW 504, 153–180 (De Gruyter, 2025); "Administering Cult at Elephantine," Yahwism under the Achaemenid Empire, Prof. Shaul Shaked in memoriam, eds. G. Barnea and R.G. Kratz, 305–336, BZAW 548 (De Gruyter, 2024); and first author with Bob Becking, "A Note on the Translation of Ezra 4:12," Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 135. Dr. Moore’s project, Digital Lab for Ancient Textual Objects (DLATO) is now live and can be found at dlato.osu.edu.
Paul Reitter
The Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, recently received the 2025 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize. Established in 1996 and newly funded by the Friends of Goethe New York, the prize honors an outstanding literary translation from German into English published in the United States the previous year. The prize-winning translator receives $5,000 as well as a fully funded trip to the Frankfurter Buchmesse from Oct.15-19, 2025. Dr. Reitter was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. This recognition places Dr. Reitter among the distinguished 100th class of Guggenheim Fellows. Dr. Reitter has been honored for his groundbreaking translation project, which focuses on rendering the second volume of Karl Marx’s Capital into English. This volume plays a vital role in Marx’s attempt to understand how the capitalist system functions. Dr. Reitter is the first Anglophone translator with access to the eight manuscripts used by Friedrich Engels when he compiled the book after Marx’sdeath. The project presents exciting editorial and philological challenges and promises to bring new insights and perspectives to the field.
Suzanne Silver
Associate professor of painting and drawing in the Department of Art, exhibited videos and photograms at the two-person exhibition Machine Oil Smells Sweet at Kadist San Francisco in the spring of 2025; exhibited a solo installation and boxed set collaboration with Christian Patterson in Suzanne’s solo exhibition, Songs of Joy, Songs of Sorrow, at The Garage Gallery in New York City in May 2025, and partnered with artist Laura Larson to curate Folds at Mariani Gallery at the University of Northern Colorado in January–February 2025.7 This same exhibition was shown at Project: ARTspace in New York in the fall of 2024. Prof. Silver had an installation, photograms and drawings shown in the group exhibition Joie at the Galerie Marcelle Alix in Paris, France, in the fall of 2024. Prof. Silver’s work was featured in the following catalogues and journals: FOLDS catalogue 2024, designed by Ryland Wharton with an essay by Laura Larson in conjunction with the FOLDS exhibition at Project: ARTspace in New York and Mariani Gallery in the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, Colorado; and 1000 Signes La critique d'art peut-elle se passer de mots? in the art journal Possible, Revue critique d'art contemporain, no.8.
Ori Yehudai
Associate professor in the Department of History and the Schottenstein Chair in Israel Studies, gave several public community talks and media interviews on Israeli affairs and the war in the Middle East. Dr. Yehudai also presented his ongoing research on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the 1970s at Ohio State’s Arts and Humanities Faculty Creative Inquiry Showcase and at the Melton Faculty Works in Progress workshop. Dr. Yehudai also organized and chaired public campus talks on Israeli history through the Melton Center, served as commentator and chair for scholarly events in the Department of History, led sessions at the Melton Advanced Text Study Group, and published a book review in the American Historical Review.
