Translating Jewish Cultures Fellowship to Kosansky

Associate Professor of Anthropology Oren Kosansky has been awarded a generous academic yearlong residential fellowship at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. The Institute seeks to advance Jewish Studies globally and offers competitive fellowships so that scholars may conduct research in relation to a given theme, which in 2020-21 is Translating Jewish Cultures. Dr. Kosansky will spend his upcoming sabbatical leave at the Institute in Ann Arbor, collaborating with other scholars from around the world and working on his book project, “Translating Jewish Morocco: Judeo-Arabic and Linguistic Modernity since Colonialism”. This project focuses on emblematic practices of translation across languages mobilized in Jewish Morocco from the French colonial period onwards. It will investigate how the conditions of colonialism and post colonialism in Morocco channeled translation practices both to and from Judeo-Arabic and its contact languages.

Previous awards to Dr. Kosansky include grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Start-up program and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. Both supported aspects of The Rabat Genizah Project, which Dr. Kosansky led to develop a digital archive of Moroccan Jewish documents at the Casablanca Jewish Museum in Casablanca, Morocco.

More about Dr. Kosansky’s work is available here.

February 2020