Dan David fellows
Dan David 2023-2025 Fellows
Anabella Esperanza
I am a social and cultural historian of the late Ottoman Empire and Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) Jewry. My research interests lie at the intersection of Jewish and Ottoman studies, history of science and health, and gender studies. I am particularly interested in the integration of the history of the body, history from the perspective of the body, and the history of body-practices, as well as in cultures in contact. My research deepens understanding of, and raises new questions about, Jews’ and women’s everyday life and Jewish-Muslim relations. In my future academic work, I intend to continue exploring the entangled histories of Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Eastern Mediterranean world.
My dissertation, “Embodying Ritual: Jewish Women’s Religious Practices and Health Care in the Late Ottoman Empire and its Successor States (1839-1922),” charted a corporeal history of Jewish women in late Ottoman and post-Ottoman spaces. I examined Jewish women’s ritual life and daily practices, and their transformations upon encountering the emerging Ottoman public health system and biomedical care. Through an analysis of a wide range of primary sources in Judeo-Spanish, Hebrew, French, English, and Turkish, I studied how women confronted the era of Ottoman reforms, through the most intimate aspects of women’s lives such as childbirth, contraception, and abortion, as well as everyday practices such those related to menstruation.
As a Dan David Fellow, I will work on a new project, “Seeds of Choice: Gender, Ethnobotany, and Cross-Cultural Continuities in the Late Ottoman Empire,” which will explore the diversity, evolution, and cultural meanings of gynecological practices among Jews in the late Ottoman empire, from the mid-nineteenth century to the empire’s dissolution in 1922.
I was a PhD fellow at the European Research Council-funded research group, “Regional History of Medicine in the Modern Middle East,” headed by Prof. Liat Kozma at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During my academic training I have held scholarships of the Rotenstreich Fellowship at the Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University, Misgav Yerushalayim at the Hebrew University, and the Ben-Zvi Institute.
For my publications >
Roy Marom
Dr. Roy Marom is a historian and historical geographer focusing on the changing demographic landacapes of Israel/Palestine. In 2022/2023, Marom served as a Fulbright Post-doctoral Fellow in the University of California, Berkeley's Department of History and as a Senior Research Scholar in Berkeley's Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES). Marom's doctoral dissertation, Dispelling Desolation: The Expansion of Arab Settlement in the Sharon Plain and the Western Part of Jabal Nablus, 1700-1948 (University of Haifa, 2022), has won the outstanding Ph.D award of the Middle East & Islamic Studies Association of Israel (MEISAI). Marom’s M.A. thesis on the Laws of Homicide and Bodily Harm in Antiquity and in Early Islamic Law (Tel Aviv University, Summa cum Laude, 2017) has won the M.A. outstanding awards of MEISAI and the Center for the Study of Relations between Jews, Christians, Muslims of the Open University of Israel. He has been awarded the Azrieli and Rotenstreich Fellowships during his studies.
Marom’s current research, on the intersection of Israel Studies and Palestine Studies, concerns the social history of rural Palestine during the Late Ottoman and British Mandate periods. His postdoctoral project explores the relational history of early intercommunal encounters in Palestine’s Jewish colonies, the moshavot (1878-1915). Marom’s integrative account draws upon the Palestinian Rural History Project (PRHP) he curated since in 2014. The PHRP contains over 1,400 oral history interviews concerning 700 Palestinian and 100 Jewish communities, consisting over 65% of the country's pre-1948 inhabited places.
In the long term, Marom aims to re-contextualize the study of Israel/Palestine's historical geography in collaboration with fellow historians, archaeologists, geographers, sociologists, and researchers from cultural studies. His articles have recently figured in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Levant, the Palestine Exploration Quarterly, Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins and War & Society.
Tamar Rozett
Tamar Rozett is a historian of technology and emotions in the modern British empire, focusing on the personal and interpersonal repercussions of everyday experiences. Her first book project, Anxious Communications: How Empire Mail Technology Shaped Emotional Connections (in preparation), looks to the ways changes in the communication infrastructure of the nineteenth century British Empire led to new expectations of postal communications that created an emotional register centered around anxiety. Her postdoctoral project, Scrubbed: The Transformation in Soaping in the Age of Empire, examines the shift in European definitions and practices of cleanliness within imperial encounters. Tamar completed her PhD dissertation at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2020). Before beginning as a Dan David scholar, Tamar was a guest scholar and lecturer at Duke University (2019-2020), a postdoctoral fellow at the Tel Aviv University School of History (2021-2022), and a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Haifa (2023).
Yotam Tsal
I am a historian of science and the environment, with a focus on France and its colonial empire in the ages of the Enlightenment and Revolutions. A central question that unites my intellectual pursuits concerns the making of modern nature in its global dimensions. I explore this issue by employing digital tools to uncover the social networks involving diverse “big” and “little” actors, ranging from renowned philosophers and naturalists to women illustrators, merchants, taxidermists, furniture and porcelain makers, and enslaved people of African descent. My first book project, tentatively titled “Compassing Birds: Globalization, Art, and Science in France and its Colonial Empire, 1760-1815,” examines the rise and fall of a “bird craze” in the late-eighteenth-century Francophone world. The book takes a close look at a variety of cultural products, such as science, the decorative arts, genre painting, poetry, and furniture, to elucidate how contemporaries exploited the allure of birds to partake in, and make sense of the period’s burgeoning global commerce and the consumer revolution. My second book project will explore the emergence of environmental awareness. It will situate this phenomenon in the context of a long history of governance and regulation of human-animal relations in the French colonial empire, as part of a project to control territories, peoples, and commodities.
I received my PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2021, after which I held a Lady David Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. My article is forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Studies. My work has received funding from the American Historical Association, the French Government, and the Mellon Foundation, among other sources.
Dan David 2022-2024 Fellows
Bar Kribus
Bar Kribus is an archaeologist specializing in Late Antique and medieval Ethiopian archaeology and the history and material culture of the Betä Ǝsraʾel (Ethiopian Jews). He was an area manager at the Naples University l'Orientale excavations in Seglamen, Ethiopia, directed by Prof. Rodolfo Fattovich (2010-2013), and served as the ceramics specialist for the Hebrew University excavations in Tiberias, directed by Dr. Katia Cytryn-Silverman (2011-2016) and for the German Protestant Institute of Archaeology excavations in Jerusalem, directed by Prof. Dieter Vieweger (2014). His MA thesis, under the guidance of Prof. Joseph Patrich and Prof. Steven Kaplan, deals with the impact of pre-Christian cult and culture on Christianity in the Kingdom of Aksum (Late Antique Ethiopia). His PhD dissertation, also under the guidance of Prof. Steven Kaplan and Prof. Joseph Patrich, deals with the monastic movement of the Betä Ǝsraʾel, with an emphasis on Betä Ǝsraʾel monastic material culture, dwelling places and practices. A central component of this research is an archaeological survey of Betä Ǝsraʾel monastic sites in Ethiopia. He was awarded a PhD in Archaeology by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2020.
From 2015, Bar was an associate of the ERC Project “Jews and Christians in the East: Strategies of Interaction between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean” (JewsEast), and from 2018, a full member of the project. He currently holds a postdoctoral fellowship of the Minerva Stiftung, at the Center for Religious Studies of the Ruhr University, Bochum (2020-2022). His current research deals with Betä Ǝsraʾel political autonomy in the Səmen Mountains of northern Ethiopia and its wars with the Christian Solomonic kingdom (15th-17th century), with a focus on the material culture and geographical aspects of these wars. During his Dan David fellowship, Bar will conduct a comparative study of the prayer houses and religious sites of the Abrahamic religions of the northern Ethiopian Highlands.
Akiva Sanders
Akiva Sanders is an archaeologist focusing on the beginnings of large-scale human societies in the Middle East. His research encompasses the initial development of central institutions and strict, hierarchical divisions of society in northern Mesopotamia from the seventh to third millennia BCE. Within this research, the daily lives of common people take center stage. Akiva investigates changes in people’s daily tasks, the appearance of their homes and tools, their relationships with their neighbors and residents of other neighborhoods, and the ways in which they visually expressed themselves and their various identities during periods of institutional expansion. The stories that are assembled from these investigations often paint pictures of desperate acts of resistance and the use of common symbols to create coalitions of resistance that sometimes had the power to challenge and destroy central institutions altogether. In the aftermath of these episodes that utterly transformed settlement life from the bottom up, Akiva focuses attention on the ways that a wide range of individuals reconstituted society through the development of new collective and personal identities and the construction of new household- or neighborhood-based arrangements for sharing economic tasks and spaces for ritual.
Akiva has approached these questions through traditional methodologies of domestic archaeology as well as pioneering work in the analysis of fingerprint impressions on ceramics. He has taken an active role in developing new methodologies for analyzing archaeological fingerprints that have the potential to tell us more about the daily lives, life histories, and identities of ancient potters than was ever possible before. In particular, this work highlights the roles of women and children, often overlooked in ancient texts, in moments of economic and social transformation.
Yaara Perlman
I am a social and political historian of early Islam, specializing in the seventh and eighth centuries CE. The main concern of my work has been to bring to light the often invisible human networks that underlay important events and moments in premodern Islamic history, with special attention to women. My dissertation, which I will defend at Princeton University in August 2022, emphasizes the importance of female kinship—particularly maternal and nursing relations—in securing political appointments during the lifetime of the Prophet Muḥammad, in the period of the Rightly Guided Caliphs, and under the Umayyad dynasty. The dissertation uncovers and follows accounts of family ties that are likely to have been integral to the personal advancement of civil and military officials in the formative period of Islam, and it thus contributes to the study of early Islamic politics, administration, and social structure. During the Dan David postdoctoral fellowship, I will seek to elucidate the circumstances that brought to power the ʿAbbāsid dynasty through an analysis of accounts of the tribal origins and ancestries of the individuals who joined the revolution’s armies. My project will investigate, among other things, the role of pre-Islamic female descent in influencing the political affiliations of many members of the Khuzāʿa tribe who supported the ʿAbbāsid revolution. The Prophet’s Medinan period is another significant research area that I have explored in several publications. In addition, a critical edition of the chapter on idol worship from the Khabar ʿan al-bashar (“History of Mankind”) of Maqrīzī, which I prepared in collaboration with Professor Michael Lecker, was published in February 2022 as part of the Bibliotheca Maqriziana series.
Peter Martin
Peter Martin works on Ancient Greek history and on Ancient Greek and Roman history-writing. He received his BA, MPhil and PhD in Classics at the University of Cambridge. His doctoral research focused on the development of Greco-Roman historiography from Herodotus and the genre’s origins in the 5th century BC up until the Late-Antique historian Ammianus Marcellinus in the 4th century AD. He is interested in how the genre of historiography changed during this 800-year time period, and why it changed. A central question of his research is: to what extent was the form of historical narratives shaped by historical events themselves? By identifying slow-moving patterns of historiographical change over time, one aim of his research is to write a ‘longue durée’ history of historiography.
He has taught a range of courses on Greek and Roman history. Most recently, he was a Visiting Lecturer in Greek History at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, where he taught two courses: one on the history of Greece (from the Minoans and Mycenaeans to the Peloponnesian War), another on the history of democracy (from Classical Athens to the American Republic). Other academic interests include the history of the use of sortition (i.e., lottery) in the direct democracy of Classical Athens; the function of set-piece speeches within ancient historical narratives; and the use of biological imagery when describing the State within Roman historiography and philosophy.
