Research Fellows

2015-2016

Research Fellows

Prof. Matthias Lehmann

Matthias Lehmann is a historian of early modern and modern Jewish history with a special interest in the history of the Spanish Jews and the Sephardi Diaspora in the Mediterranean world. His most recent book, Emissaries from the Holy Land (Stanford University Press, 2014) tells the story of a philanthropic network that was overseen by the Jewish community leadership in the Ottoman capital Istanbul between the 1720s and the 1820s, in support of the impoverished Jews of Palestine. His other publications include Ladino Rabbinic Literature and Ottoman Sephardic Culture (Indiana University Press, 2005), in which he studies the transformation of Ottoman Jewry in the nineteenth century through the lens of popularized rabbinic literature written in the Judeo-Spanish vernacular of the Ottoman Sephardim. He is the co-author, together with John Efron and Steven Weitzman, of The Jews: A History, a textbook on Jewish history that is now available in its second edition (Pearson, 2014). As a Fulbright scholar at Tel Aviv University, Lehmann will be working on a biography of Maurice de Hirsch, the nineteenth century Jewish banker, railroad entrepreneur, and celebrity philanthropist.

Prof. Dennis Jett

Professor Dennis Jett is a former American ambassador who joined the School of International Affairs after a career in the U.S. Foreign Service that spanned twenty-eight years and three continents. His experience and expertise focus on international relations, foreign aid administration, and American foreign policy. Immediately prior to joining Penn State, he was dean of the International Center at the University of Florida for eight years.

Among his publication: Why American Foreign Policy Fails: Unsafe at Home and Despised Abroad, Why Peacekeeping Fails, The Nexus Between Peacekeeping and Peace-Building: The Case of Mozambique and Evacuation During Civil War, Liberia.

Dr. Gabriela Jonas Aharoni

Gabriela Jonas Aharoni received her BA from the Department of Social Communication in Rosario University, Argentina.  She later received an MA in Communication and Journalism from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a PhD from the Faculty of Arts’ Interdisciplinary Program of Tel Aviv University.

She currently teaching in the departments of Cinema and Television, and Liberal Arts and Sciences of Sapir College. Jonas Aharoni has already published several articles in academic journals, such as "Jewish Identities in Argentinian Television Fiction: the case of Graduados", in Jewish Film and New Media, "Telenovelas de época y cine: la intertextualidad como herramienta que construye segmentos de la memoria histórica argentina", in Nuevo Mundo Nuevos Mundos and "Globalización e identidades plurales en las telenovelas argentinas de fines de siglo", in E.I.A.L. Her new book "Argentinian Telenovelas. Southern Sagas Rewrite Social and Political Reality" will be published in September 2015.