BAJS student essay prize 2019

Manchester award winner. The annual national Postgraduate Student Essay prize offered by the British Association for Jewish Studies was awarded to a Manchester student this year, Hollie Eaton, for an essay entitled 'Blackguards in Bonnets: Women’s Suffrage, Religion and Interfaith Relations, 1910-1914' (supervised by Daniel Langton). Further information.

Literature group

Being Jewish In Victorian Fiction. This short course will be run by Sherry Ashworth, a PhD student at the Centre for Jewish Studies and will serve as an introduction to three late Victorian novels about Jews. The books are Daniel Deronda on 24 Oct (register here), Reuben Sachs on 31 Oct (register here) and Children of the Ghetto on 14 Nov 2019 (register here). 6.00 - 7.30pm in the Lower Ground Floor activity room at the Manchester Central Library. Please register for each session individually through the eventbrite links. There is no charge for participants and places are limited. Further information.

Modern Hebrew course

University level Hebrew tuition from Sept 2019. Modern Hebrew on three levels will be available at the University of Manchester from September 2019. The cost of auditing the courses is £570 and there will be no formal assessment. Apply for a place through the Language Centre. The courses will be taught in a mixed teaching environment for classroom-based students alongside distance-learning students (via a swivl robot and video-conferencing link). Audit fee bursaries are available to students at Universities belonging to the Northern Jewish Studies Partnership and other Universities. Further information.

Summer School, Manchester

Jews and others in Manchester. Philip Alexander gave a course entitled 'Manchester: Melting Pot of Faiths' for the Manchester International Summer School, 7-26 July 2019. Students learnt about the social history of the religions that shaped Manchester, how the distinctive beliefs and practices of each religion are made visible and the challenges that face religions in Manchester. Further information.

Conference paper, Cardiff

Jewish Studies. Katja Stuerzenhofecker has contributed a paper entitled "Communicating the exotic? Anti-Judaism and affect in cross-cultural learning about religious Jews" to a panel on 'Religion and Racialisation' at the Sociology of Religion Study Group Annual Conference 'Communicating Religion' at Cardiff, 9-11 July 2019. Further information.

Screen & Talk

The Women’s Balcony. The Centre for Jewish Studies’ occasional film club hosted a screening of The Women’s Balcony (dir. Emil Ben-Shimon, Israel, 2016) at the Northern British Isles Jewish Studies Partnership’s Early Career and Postgraduate Research Training Event and Research Meeting on 26 June 2019. We were joined for the discussion of the film by Ma’ayan Nechama Atlas. Further information.

Bogdanow student report

Holocaust studies. A recipient of a Bogdanow student travel grant, Eleanor Davies, BA German Studies, has written about her visit to Auschwitz and Birkenau. Further information.

Conference paper, Bucharest

Jewish and European Studies. Maria Cioată will contribute a paper entitled "The Reception of Apocrypha as ‘Popular Books’ in Romania" to a panel on "Biblical Apocrypha in South-East Europe: Variation and Transmission from Antiquity to Modern Times" at the 12th Congress of the Association of South East European Studies in Bucharest, 6 Sept 2019. Further information.

Training workshop, Jewish Studies

Doctoral and Early Career research training in Jewish Studies. The fourth postgraduate research-training event took place on 25-27 June 2019 at the University of Manchester. 19 PhD students and post-doctoral researchers from the Jewish Studies Northern Partnership institutions and other universities in the wider UK attended the event. This year we also had attendees travelling from as far afield as USA, Japan and Israel. A range of training and information sessions were offered, including advice on turning a PhD thesis into a monograph and open access publication practices, research impact, how to cope with negative responses to your work, and academic engagement with online audiences, as well as a series of sessions on 'Current Trends' in fields of Jewish Studies including Biblical Studies, Jewish Literary Studies and Palestine/Israel Studies. This year there was a special focus on writing large grants and on the job application and interview experience from the perspectives of both the applicant and selection panel. There was also the opportunity for one-to-one discussions with mentors. A screening of the film ‘The Women’s Balcony’ was followed by expert panel discussion. Further information.

Bogdanow student report

Holocaust studies. A recipient of a Bogdanow student travel grant, Sassy Holmes, BA Drama, has written about her visit to Auschwitz and Birkenau. Further information.

Philip Alexander student prize 2019

Undergraduate student prize in Jewish Studies. The winner for 2019 is Abigail Elderfield for a dissertation on 'To what extent does the status of infertile Jewish women in Israeli society depend on the concept of motherhood?' (supervised by Katja Stuerzenhofecker). This £100 prize is awarded annually to the student with 'the highest grade in a Jewish Studies-related module or dissertation' at the University of Manchester. It honours the Centre's first co-director Philip Alexander, FBA. Further information.

Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship

Digital Humanities. Congratulations to Marton Ribary, who has been awarded a three-year Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship for a project entitled "Computational modelling of law - Sustainable legal AI from Roman legal sources" tenable from 1 November 2019. The project will be hosted by the School of Law at the University of Surrey in co-operation with the Alan Turing Institute and Surrey's Department of Computer Science. The research is primarily based on legal texts compiled by the order of Emperor Justinian (553 CE) with control text samples drawn from Rabbinic (Jewish) law of the same period. Further information.