Professor Heschel's lecture will ultimately be available in published form. Meanwhile, this recently-published article of hers has significant overlap with her oral presentation:
Susannah Heschel holds the Eli Black Professorship in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. Her scholarship focuses on Jewish-Christian relations in Germany during the 19th and 20th centuries, the history of biblical scholarship, and the history of antisemitism. Her numerous publications include Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (University of Chicago Press), which won a National Jewish Book Award, and The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton University Press).
Currently she is writing a book on the history of European Jewish scholarship on Islam from the 1830s to the 1930s. For that project, she received a Scholar’s Grant in Islamic Studies from the Carnegie Foundation, and was given a fellowship in 2011-12 to the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, an institute for advanced study.
Her interest in the topic began when she was awarded a personal grant from the Ford Foundation, which she used to convene a series of six conferences of scholars in the fields of Jewish Studies and Islamic Studies, and to co-teach a course on Women and Gender in Islam and Judaism, together with the anthropologist Maimuna Huq.
She has lectured at conferences and universities around the world, and spent a year as a fellow at the National Humanities Center. She is the recipient of honorary doctorates from Colorado College, Trinity College, the University of St. Michael’s College (the graduate faculty in Catholic Theology at the University of Toronto), and the Augustana Theologische Hochschule, a Protestant seminary in Bavaria.
Prof. Heschel has held visiting professorships at Princeton, the University of Cape Town, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Frankfurt. From 1999-2008 she served on the Academic Advisory Committee of the Research Center of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and on its subcommittees on fellowships, archival materials, and publications; she currently serves on the Museum’s Committee on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust. At Dartmouth she teaches in the departments of History and Religion, and in the Jewish Studies Program and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program.
She is a pioneer in the field of Jewish feminism, and many of her publications have dealt with issues related to gender and sexuality, including “Jesus as Theological Transvestite,” “From Jesus to Shylock: Configurations of Christians, Jews, and Gender in The Merchant of Venice,” “Homoeroticism and the Origins of Christianity,” “Theological Bulimia: Christianity and Its Dejudaization,” “Gender and Agency in the Feminist Historiography of Jewish Identity,” and “Does Atrocity Have a Gender? Women in the SS.”
The author of over a hundred and twenty articles, she has also edited and co-edited several books, including On Being a Jewish Feminist: A Reader; Redefining First-Century Jewish and Christian Identities: A Festschrift for E.P. Sanders; Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust; Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays of Abraham Joshua Heschel; and Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism.