Susannah Heschel

Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies

Susannah Heschel is the Eli Black Professor of 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 anti-Semitism. Her numerous publications include Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (University of Chicago Press), which won a National Jewish Book Award and Germany's Geiger Prize, and The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton University Press). She is the author of over seventy articles and has edited several books, including Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays of Abraham Joshua Heschel; Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (with Robert P. Ericksen); Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism(with David Biale and Michael Galchinsky).

The recipient of many grants and awards, she has been a Rockefeller fellow at the National Humanities Center, and two years ago received an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters from Colorado College; in 2008 she received an honorary doctorate from the Augustana Theologische Hochschule, a Protestant seminary in Bavaria, Germany. In 2007, she received the John M. Manley Huntington award from Dartmouth, and in 2008 she was elected an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa. During the academic year 2008-2009, she was awarded the Jacobus Family Fellowship by Dartmouth. In 2013, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In November 2009, she received an honorary doctorate of sacred letters from the University of St. Michael's College, the graduate faculty in Catholic theology of the University of Toronto, and in May 2010 she received an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, where she also delivered the Baccalaureate address.

With grants from the Ford Foundation, she has convened a series of five international conferences of scholars in the fields of Jewish Studies and Islamic Studies, held at Dartmouth College between 2002 and 2007. The Carnegie Foundation awarded her a Scholar's Grant that has given her two years of leave, starting in January 2009, to write a book on the history of Jewish scholarship on Islam.

Prof. Heschel has held visiting professorships at Princeton University, the University of Cape Town, and the University of Frankfurt. She has also taught in 2005 and 2008 at the University of Edinburgh. Between 1999 and 2008 she served on the Academic Advisory Committee of the Research Center of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and on its subcommittee on archival materials and publications.

At Dartmouth she has convened a dozen major conferences and invited numerous guest speakers and visiting professors in Jewish Studies, in addition to her teaching and advising. She is also co-convener of two faculty seminars, on psychoanalytic theory and on race. She serves on the faculty in the Jewish Studies Program, the Department of Religion, and the Women's and Gender Studies Program.

Susannah Heschel will be a research fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin for the year, September 2011- July, 2012.

Courses and Programs

Spring 2013

Non-Teaching Resident Term

Summer 2013

JWST 11 (11) History and Culture of the Jews II (Identical to HIST 94.1)
JWST 34 (10) History of the Jews in Germany (Identical to GER 44 and HIST 6.1)

Fall 2013 - Winter 2014

Non-Teaching Terms

Spring 2014

JWST 10 (2A) History and Culture of the Jews I: The Classical Period (Identical to HIST 94.8)
JWST 15 (10A) Women and Gender in Islam and Judaism (co-taught with Katajun Amirpur, Harris Visiting Professor)