MIRIAM BODIAN Department of History University of Texas at Austin 1 University Station B7000 Austin, TX 78712 Email: bodian@austin.utexas.edu EDUCATION Ph.D. 1988 Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Jewish History. M.A. 1981 Hebrew University, Jewish History. B.A. 1969 Harvard University, American History and Literature. PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE Professor, Department of History, University of Texas at Austin, January 2009-present. Visiting fellow, Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, Madrid. Project funded by European Research Council: Conversion, Overlapping Religiosities, Polemics and Interaction: Early Modern Iberia and Beyond, September-December 2016. Fellow, Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Michigan, 2011-2012. Professor of Jewish History, Graduate School for Jewish Studies, Touro College, July 2004- December 2008. Harry Starr Fellow, Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University, 2003-2004. Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies, Pennsylvania State University, July 1998-July 2004. Associate, Frankel Center for Jewish Studies, University of Michigan, February-June 1998. Fellow, Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Oxford University, September 1997- January 1998. Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies and History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1990-1997. Assistant Professor of Jewish History, Yeshiva University, New York, 1988-90.
2 Instructor, The Open University, Tel Aviv, 1987-88. RECENT GRANTS, FELLOWSHIPS AND AWARDS Fellowship, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid, fall 2016. Fellow, American Academy for Jewish Research, elected May 2013. Fellowship, The Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Michigan, for the academic year 2011-2012. BOOKS Dying in the Law of Moses: Crypto-Jewish Martyrdom in the Iberian World (Indiana University Press, 2007). Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Indiana University Press, 1997). - Winner of 1998 National Jewish Book Award in history. - Winner of first annual Koret Jewish Book Award in history. RECENT ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS Uriel da Costa s Career: An Interpretation, to be published in Doubt to Unbelief, a volume on skepticism in early modern Iberia edited by Mercedes García-Arenal, submitted Aug., 2017. Americo Castro s Conversos and the Question of Subjectivity, to be published in Fernando Rodríguez Mediano and Carlos Cañete, eds., Interioridad, sujeto, autoridad: conversions y contrarreforma en la construcción del sujeto (ss. XVI-XVII), Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Submitted November 2016. Baptized or Not? The Inquisitors Dilemma in Trials of Portuguese Jews from Dutch Brazil, 1645-1647, to be published in Claude Stuczynski and Bruno Feitler, eds., Portuguese Jews, New Christians and 'New Jews,' Brill. Submitted February 2015. The Geography of Conscience: A Seventeenth-Century Atlantic Jew and the Inquisition, The Journal of Modern History 89:2 (2017), 247-281. From the Files of the Portuguese Inquisition: Isaac de Castro Tartas s Latin Ego-Document, 1645, co-author Ide François, The Jewish Quarterly Review 107:2 (spring 2017), 231-246.
3 Portuguese Jews and the Language of Liberty, The Journal of Levantine Studies 6 (December 2016), 313-332. Early Modern Economic Thought and Portuguese-Jewish Self-Perception, in José Alberto Silva Tavim, Maria Filomena Lopes de Barros, and Lúcia Liba Muczik, eds., In the Iberian Peninsula and Beyond: A History of Jews and Muslims (15th-17th Centuries), 2 vols., Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, April 2015, 1:348-367. Behind Closed Doors: A Dominican Friar s Debate with a Dutch Jew, from the Records of an Inquisition Trial, Lisbon, 1645-1666, Jewish Studies Quarterly 21:4 (2014), 362-390. The Formation of the Portuguese-Jewish Diaspora, in Jane Gerber, ed., The Jewish Diaspora in the Caribbean, Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2013, 17-27. The Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam and the Status of Christians, in Elisheva Carlebach and Jacob J. Schacter, eds., New Perspectives on Jewish-Christian Relations, In Honor of David Berger (Brill 2012), 329-357. Liberty of Conscience and the Jews in the Dutch Republic, Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations: The Electronic Journal of the Council of Centers on Jewish-Christian Relations 6 (2011): http://ejournals.bc.edu/ojs/index.php/scjr/article/view/1587/1439 Crypto-Jewish Criticism of Tradition and its Echoes in Jewish Communities, in Zvi Gitelman, ed., Religion or Ethnicity? Jewish Identities in Evolution, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009, 38-58. Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: The Ambiguous Boundaries of Self-Definition, Jewish Social Studies 15:1 (Fall 2008), 66-80. The Reformation and the Jews, in Jeremy Cohen and Moshe Rosman, eds., Rethinking European Jewish History, Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization 2008, 112-132. (This volume received the 2009 National Jewish Book Award in the category of anthologies and collections. ) RECENT PAPERS, PUBLIC LECTURES, PRESENTATIONS Round Table discussion: Cultures of Record Keeping: Creation, Preservation, and Use in the Early Modern Period, Early Modern Workshop, Fordham University at Lincoln Center, New York, NY, August 16-17. Noahide Law and the Universality of Jewish Salvation : Christian Hebraists and Portuguese Jews, The Seventeenth World Congress of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem, Israel, August 6-10, 2017. The Geography of Conscience: Isaac de Castro Tartas and the Lisbon Inquisition, seminar paper, Scuola Normale Superiore de Pisa, Pisa, December 7, 2016.
4 From Idea to Book: Investigating Portuguese Jews and Conversos, seminar talk, Scuola Normale Superiore de Pisa, Pisa, December 6, 2016. Crypto-Jewish Dissimulation and Martyrdom: Ambivalent Values, international conference on Coming to Terms with Forced Conversion: Coercion and Faith in Pre-Modern Iberia and Beyond, CSIC/Residencia de Estudiantes, Madrid, November 17-18, 2016. Portuguese Jews and the Language of Freedom, seminar paper given at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, November 2, 2016. Américo Castro s Conversos and the Question of Subjectivity, seminar paper given at the CCHS- CSIC Madrid, October 6, 2016. How to Read an Inquisition File, Workshop, Centrum Judaicum, Berlin (multi-university center), July 1, 2016. Portuguese Jews and the Language of Freedom, invited paper, Centrum Judaicum, Berlin (multiuniversity center), June 30, 2016. Baptized or Not? The Inquisitors Dilemma in Trials of Portuguese Jews from Dutch Brazil, 1645-1647, III Simposio Internacional de Estudios Inquisitoriales, Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, Spain, June 10-12, 2015. Portuguese Jews and the Language of Freedom, invited paper, International Workshop on The Political Dimensions of the Converso Phenomenon in Portugal and Beyond, Bar-Ilan University and the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, Israel, May 26-28, 2015. A Case of Conscience: The Inquisitorial Defense of a Seventeenth-Century Atlantic Jew, Religious Studies Colloquium, University of Texas at Austin, February 9, 2015. The Myth of Converso Modernity, 46 th Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies, Baltimore, Dec. 14-16, 2014. Polemical Uses of the Bible in 17 th -Century Inquisition Trials of Judaizers, International Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, Vienna, July 6-10, 2014. Conscience and Freedom of Conscience among the Portuguese Jews in Amsterdam, paper, 45 th Conference of the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, Modena, June 26-29, 20014. Conversos at the Intersection of Jewish and Iberian Historiography, invited paper, Early Modern Europe: Did Jews Make a Difference? A Symposium, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, March 26-27, 2014.
5 The Portuguese Jews and the Rabbis: The Problem of Religious Authority, invited paper at the Third Annual Richard J. Gunst Colloquium in Jewish Studies, on Iberian Jews, Conversos, and the Question of Modernity, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, March 2-3, 2014. The Early Modern Trade System, Jewish Exile, and Jewish Triumphalism, Sixteenth Century Society Conference, San Juan, Puerto Rico, Oct. 24-27, 2013. RECENT UNIVERSITY SERVICE Director, Institute for Historical Studies, University of Texas at Austin, four-year term beginning fall 2017. Steering Committee, Institute for Historical Studies, spring 2017. Chair, Salary committee, History Department, 2016-2017. European Area Chair, History Department, 2014-2015. Graduate Studies Committee, Religious Studies Department, 2013-present. Executive committee, History Department, University of Texas at Austin, 2015-2016. RECENT SERVICE TO THE PROFESSION Co-chair, Centenary Project (2020), American Academy for Jewish Research, 2016-present. Executive Committee, American Academy for Jewish Research, 2014-2present. Organizer, retreat workshop, American Academy for Jewish Research, May 2016. Co-organizer, retreat workshop, American Academy for Jewish Research, May 20-22, 2014. Member, Academic Advisory Board, Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2012-present. Book Review Editor, AJS Review (the flagship journal of Jewish Studies), fall 2011-2015.