The Center of Jewish Studies sponsors a wide-range of student projects, from MFA's working to convey the multifaceted Jewish experience and PhD students engaging in critical research into Jewish history, literature and ways of being. 

Below is a list of some student projects the Center has funded over the years. 

Grant Awardees

Gwendolyn Pare, PhD Candidate, Spanish and Portuguese

Kelly Donahey, PhD Candidate, Visual Studies

Na'amit Nagel, PhD Student, English

Natasya Kosygina, PhD Student, Visual Studies

Karem Delgado, PhD Student, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Karem's dissertation will be among the first to investigate how Crypto-Jewesses—Jewish converts to Christianity that secretly adhered to Judaism— occupy space as active subjects who, rather than conform to fixed and immobile places, constantly (re)create, inhabit and experience them. By re-appropriating physical and symbolic spaces that are exclusively Jewish and endowing Jewish religious significance to neutral spaces—neither Christian nor Jewish— Crypto-Jewesses grant space Jewish meaningfulness.

Daniel Carnie, PhD, Department of Comparative Literature

Emma Lazarus: Sephardic Judaism in Translation

Jenna Abrams, MFA

Abrams novel-in-progress focuses on the history of Ashkenazi Jewry in the Borscht Belt area of the United States, with a special emphasis on the region’s links to Ashkenazi communities in the area of Eastern Europe comprising the modern-day Czech Republic.

Rebecca Sacks, MFA

Sacks's debut novel, City of a Thousand Gates, is told in interconnected short stories, all involving characters who live in and between Palestine and Israel. The stories I write consider the consequences of building a life in a place of blurred boundaries, one in which there is an unstable distinction between combatant and civilian, between the past and the present.