Professor Hannah Kosstrin is the new director of the Melton Center for Jewish Studies. After 25 years as director, Professor Tamar Rudavsky returns full-time to teaching in the Department of  Philosophy.

Kosstrin is a dance historian specializing in Jewish and Israeli dance. She is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Dance.  Dr. Kosstrin joined the Ohio State faculty in 2014, and previously taught at Reed College, Wittenberg University, and Ohio University Pickerington Center. 

Dr. Kosstrin’s first monograph, Honest Bodies: Revolutionary Modernism in the Dances of Anna Sokolow (Oxford University Press, 2017) was a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award Finalist, Association for Jewish Studies, and examines the transnational circulation of American modernism through Anna Sokolow’s choreography among the communist and Jewish currents of the international Left from the 1930s to the 1960s in the United States, Mexico, and Israel. Her current book project Kinesthetic Peoplehood: Jewish Diasporic Dance Migrations (under contract in the Studies in Dance Theory Series of Oxford University Press) queries Jewish dance migrations between Israel and the United States for Sephardi, Mizrahi, and Ethiopian Jewish artists between the Cold War and Covid. 

Hannah is invested in building on the Melton Center’s strengths on campus and in the community to foster a diversity of programmatic support in Jewish Studies for Ohio State faculty, students, staff, and community members. She is committed to deepening and expanding the infrastructure for Jewish history, culture, and arts at Ohio State.