Description

2027–28 Fellowship Year: Between Mind and World in Premodern Jewish Life 

Humanistic inquiry has long been energized by a desire to enmesh texts and ideas into the social, political, and material contexts in which they developed. The study of premodern Jews has likewise been driven by this desire—always on the lookout for new ways to move between the ideational and the real—to better understand texts and ideas as responses to and as shaping forces within a world of social interaction and conflict, materiality and spatiality, and the contingencies of lived experience.

The Katz Center for Advanced Judaic studies seeks to use its 2027–28 fellowship year to support this aspiration to connect premodern Jewish thought and expression to the extra-textual realms of the material and the social, calling for relevant applications from scholars working in any field of premodern Jewish history and culture as these developed throughout the world between the Hellenistic period and the end of the European Middle Ages in the sixteenth century. New research has striven to expand our understanding of Jewish life beyond the small elites that have been the focus of Jewish studies in earlier generations. What new insights might yet emerge by continuing to expand our understanding of the worlds of premodern Jewish thought and expression—the interpersonal, intercultural, political, economic, institutional, material, and environmental contexts shaping and shaped by premodern Jewish minds?

Requirements

The goal of the Katz Center fellowship is to both support individual research projects and promote intellectual community through conversation, conferences, and other activities meant to bridge the differences among disciplines and subfields. Applications will be evaluated based on their individual merits and their potential to contribute to the experience of other fellows. Selected fellows are provided with a stipend for a year or a semester and the time and resources needed to pursue their individual projects (including an office, computer, and library privileges at the University of Pennsylvania), and they are expected to actively engage in the intellectual life of the fellowship community. All applicants must have a doctoral degree by the start of the fellowship. Fellows are expected to live in Philadelphia for the term of their fellowship, which can run for the whole academic year (September–April) or a single semester.

More information is included in the Katz Center application. Applications are due October 27, 2026.

Find answers to frequently asked questions here. For other inquiries please contact Marci Seder at sederm@upenn.edu.