The Mediterranean Initiative is very pleased to welcome the first two of our four new faculty: Paroma Chatterjee (History of Art) and Jessica Marglin (Frankel Center).

 

Paroma Chatterjee

Paroma Chatterjee did a BA in French at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and another in History of Art at the University of Cambridge.  She earned her PhD at the University of Chicago in 2007 and was Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, from 2009.  A specialist in Byzantine art, she works on artistic networks between Byzantium and the Latin West from the 11th to the 13th century.  She has recently completed a book manuscript entitled Living Icons: Saints and Representation in Byzantium and Italy, 11th-13th centuries and is currently working on a project on sculpture in medieval romance.    Recent articles include "Ekphrasis, epigrams, and color in Hysmine and Hysminias" (forthcoming in Dumbarton Oaks Papers);  “Francis’ Secret Stigmata”, Art History 35:1 (Feb, 2012): 38-61;“Sculpted eloquence and Nicetas Choniates’ De Signis”, Word & Image 27:4 (2011): 396-406; “Archive and Atelier: Sinai and the Case of the Narrative Icon”, in Sharon E. J. Gerstel and Robert S. Nelson eds., Approaching the Holy Mountain: Art and Liturgy at St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai (Turnhout: Brepols Press, 2011), 319-44; and “Problem Portraits: The Ambivalence of Visual Representation in Byzantium”,  Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 40:2 (2010): 223-47.

 

Jessica Marglin

Jessica Marglin did her BA at Harvard and received her PhD from the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton in 2012.  She has also studied at the École des hautes études in Paris and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  Her research focuses on the history of Sephardic Jews in North Africa and the Islamic Mediterranean.  Her dissertation, entitled “In the Courts of the Nations: Jews, Muslims, and Legal Pluralism in Nineteenth-Century Morocco,” investigates how Jews navigated the various legal systems open to them in Morocco from 1830 until the advent of French colonization in 1912, and is based on manuscript sources in Arabic, Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Spanish.  Her next project will study transnational Jewish networks in North Africa and the Mediterranean from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.  Recent articles include “La modernité juridique au Maroc: protégés juifs, tribunaux consulaires et droit islamique,” in Migrations, identité et modernité au Maroc, ed. Frédéric Abécassis and Karima Dirèche (Paris, Séguier, forthcoming); “Modernizing Moroccan Jews: The AIU Alumni Association in Tangier, 1893-1913,” Jewish Quarterly Review 101, 4 (Fall 2011);  and “Poverty and Charity in a Moroccan City: A Study of Jewish Communal Leadership in Meknes, 1750-1912,” in The Convergence of Judaism and Islam: Religious, Scientific and Cultural Dimensions, ed. Michael M. Laskier and Yaacov Lev (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011).