Associate Professor of Religion

Ph.D., Religious Studies, Stanford University, 1997
M.A., Stanford University, 1994
M.T.S., Harvard Divinity School, 1991
B.A., Religion, Haverford College, 1988

I teach a wide range of courses in Judaic Studies focusing on Modern Jewish Thought and methodological issues in the study of religion. My particular interests focus on modern Jewish conceptions of identity and authority, and material conceptions of self. I also read widely in political science, philosophy, and cultural studies where these disciplines intersect with religious questions concerning public religion, the politics of identity, and religious material practices. To visit my personal website, go here

My book Moses Hess and Modern Jewish Identity (Indiana University Press, 2001) draws together conceptions of identity in works from Moses Hess (1812-1875) and contemporary ethical reflections on identity, community, and tradition. I suggest how Hess's confusions in Rome and Jerusalem (1862) are helpful struggles in modern conceptions of Jewish identity.  I employ the philosophical language of self from the works of Charles Taylor and Stuart Hampshire to uncover Hess's account of Jewish identity in order to deepen our understanding of the complex fragments that coexist in Jewish identity in particular, and modern identity in general. I have just completed a manuscript on conceptions of religious authority in the work of Abraham Geiger entitled Abraham Geiger's Liberal Judaism: Personal Meaning and Religious Authority, to be published by Indiana University Press.  This work explores questions of authority relating to historical memory, ritual practices, tradition, identity, and hermeneutics. My new interests center on the ways in which American Jewish thinkers conceptualize materiality and the material self.  I am interested in how such thinkers as Mordecai Kaplan explore Jewish identity in and through the creation and production of material products, or how Joseph Soloveitchik creates sacred space and practice within an urban landscape.