Summer Workshop (online): Intro to Sephardic Culture July 7-10, 2025
David Wacks
https://www.mediterraneanseminar.org/overview-sephardic-culture-2025
This Summer Skills Seminar provides participants with an overview of main currents in Sephardic Studies including historical and cultural trends, texts, sources for the period 900-1700 CE, attending to the potential of this field to enhance your own research and teaching. It is designed with academics in mind, particularly graduate students, postdocs, and professors working in disciplines such as history, literature, religious studies, but all interested parties are welcome to apply. Participants will receive a completion certificate which may be listed on your CV and other documents such as grant/fellowship applications. The seminar is held via zoom over four days, with two two-hour sessions each day. Participants are expected to prepare readings in advance of the sessions, which will be a blend of lecture, pair and group discussion, group close readings, and in-class activities.
The course will be conducted by Prof. David A. Wacks (Romance Languages, University of Oregon; PhD UC Berkeley 2003), Harry Starr Fellow in Jewish Studies (Harvard, 2006), and recipient of the 2015 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Sephardic Culture. His research focuses on the literary footprint of the confluence of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the Iberian Peninsula and Sephardic Diaspora. He blogs on his current research at davidwacks.uoregon.edu. He is author of Framing Iberia: Frametales and Maqamat in Medieval Spain, (Brill, 2007), winner of the 2009 La coroìnica award, and Double Diaspora in Sephardic Literature: Jewish Cultural Production before and after 1492 (Indiana University Press, 2015), and Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World (University of Toronto Press, 2019). Selected recent publications include: “Medieval Iberian Romance” in The New Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance (2023), “Sefarad” in Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Medieval Iberia: Unity in Diversity (2021), “Sepharadim/Conversos and Premodern Global Hispanism” in Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 20.1-2 (2019)