The Herbert D. Katz Center at The University of Pennsylvania is now accepting applications for the 2019–2020 academic year on the theme of The Jewish Home: Dwelling on the Domestic, the Familial, and the Lived-In.

The Katz Center will devote our 2019–2020 fellowship year to the home—to what happens inside Jewish homes and what connects those homes to life outside. We invite applications from scholars in any academic field who are seeking to advance research that will shed light on this most formative and intimate of contexts for Jewish life, including the very definition of home.

As an object of inquiry, the home has not one door but many. We are planning a year that will look into the Jewish home across many different thresholds/entryways and look back out from the home into the broader world. Relevant topics may include the history of domestic architecture and material culture, anthropological research into kinship, parenting, gender roles, and master-servant relationships; literary instantiations of the home as an object of memory and imagination; representations of Jewish domesticity in the visual arts, including theater, film, and television; the analysis of Jewish law as it relates to family life and sex; the economics of consumption and display; the ritual study of the life cycle as it plays out in domestic contexts; and urban studies that approach the home as part of neighborhoods or larger social contexts, among others.

Eligible projects may be focused on the home in any period of Jewish history, extending from the four room houses of Iron Age Canaan to contemporary Jewish retirement communities. The year is also open to projects that may not be focused on the home per se but are helpful for understanding it, such as research on the history of privacy or the anthropology of childhood. The Center’s goal is to support individual projects, but it also seeks to develop an intellectually diverse cohort which means the ideal applicant will be one willing to learn from and work with scholars from other disciplines or focused on other periods.

The Katz Center invites applications from scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and the arts at all levels. Applicants must hold a Ph.D. or expect to receive their degree no later than August 2019.

With funding from the Israel Institute and in partnership with Penn’s Jewish Studies Program, the Katz Center is offering a teaching fellowship in 2019–2020. Full details are available on our website.

Commencement of fellowship period: Variable, from September 2019 to May 2020

Duration of fellowship period: One semester (fall or spring) or full academic year

Please visit katz.sas.upenn.edu for more information about the Katz Center’s fellowship program and to access the online application portal.