Dan David fellows

Dan David 2023-2025 Fellows

 

 

Anabella EsperanzaAnabella 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 MaromRoy 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