This fall, the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies will host a prestigious group of scholars who will gather around the theme "Sephardic Identities: Medieval and Early Modern." They will be led by Head Fellow Ryan Szpiech.

The 2018–19 Frankel fellows and their fields of research are:

Ilil Baum, Bar-Ilan University, “The Knowledge of Arabic among the Jews of the Crown of Aragon: Late Medieval Jewish Multilingualism as a Marker of an Elitist Culture”

Ross Brann, Cornell University, “Andalusi and Sefardi Exceptionalism”

Monica Aparicio Colominas, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, “Sephardic Exceptionalism in the anti-Jewish Polemics of Medieval Iberian Muslims”

Brian Hamm, University of Central Florida, “Being ‘Portuguese’ at the Diasporic Margins”

Marc Herman, Columbia University and Fordham University, “Andalusian Independence from Geonic Authority in its Mālikī and Almohad Contexts”

Maya Irish, Rice University, “Sephardic Exceptionalism and the Castilian Jewish Elites”

Martin Jacobs, Washington University (St. Louis), "Constantinople vs. Tenochtitlán:

Imperial Expansion through a Post-Expulsion Sephardic Lens"

Ehud Krinis, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, “'Duties of the Heart' and the 'Kuzari' as Two Alternative Systematic Responses to the Hardships of the Jewish Communal life in al-Andalus”

Devi Mays, University of Michigan, “The Sephardi Connection: Ottoman Jews, the Opium Trade, and the Aftereffects of Empire”

Sarah Pearce, New York University, “In the Taifa Kingdoms: The Medieval Poetics of Modern Nationalism”

Vaselios Syros, University of Jyväskylä (Finland), “Visions of History and Sephardic Identities: Medieval and Early Modern Perspectives”

Ryan Szpiech, University of Michigan, “He is Still Israel? Conversion and Sephardic Identity before and after 1391”

Moshe Yagur, University of Haifa, “Who was a 'Sepharadi'? A view from the Cairo Geniza”