Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Fields of Study
- Jewish Cultures, Languages, and Literatures
- Jewish History and Social Sciences
Areas of Interest
- Medieval Jewish History
- Interreligious Interaction
- Sensory Theory
- Disability Studies
- History of Theatre and Performance
Name of Postdoctoral Fellowship
Description
During her postdoctoral fellowship, Emilie is preparing her dissertation as a monograph entitled “Public Observing and the Aural Tradition: Sensory Dynamics and Medieval Jewish-Christian Interaction.” She is also beginning work on her second book, examining medieval Jewish and Christian experiences and perceptions of “invisible” disabilities. The project involves incorporating contemporary disability studies into a Jewish studies framework, and discusses cases of deafness, disorders of speech and language, and generally non-neurotypical behaviors in both Jewish and Christian sources. Reading narratives about Jewish and Christian interaction through a unifying theoretical framework of disability studies offers a new way of engaging with the history of the senses in a medieval context -- and a new way of seeing, hearing, and understanding Christian-Jewish relations.
This winter, Emilie will be teaching a new undergraduate seminar called “Sensory Encounters: Medieval Perceptions and Interreligious Interactions,” which explores the roles and importance of the senses through the lenses of medieval history and modern sensory theory.
Biography
Emilie Amar-Zifkin is a historian of Jewish-Christian relations and medieval Jewish history. Her doctoral dissertation, “Observing the Observers: Procession and Public Religion in Medieval Ashkenaz,” examined Jewish-Christian interaction and the performance of religious identity in public space. Reading through the lenses of spatial and sensory theory, her analysis engaged both legal and narrative sources about, seeing, hearing, and performing Jewish and Christian identities in the medieval public sphere.