The University of Michigan Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies is accepting applications for the 2027-28 “Rethinking Jewish Peoplehood: Towards a New Archive” theme year, led by Head Fellow Rebecca Wollenberg. Applications are due on November 2, 2026.
Fellowship applications are accepted from both tenured and untenured faculty as well as from recent Ph.D. s without a tenure-track position and professors emeriti. Where appropriate, applications are also
accepted from independent artists, documentary filmmakers, and writers. For these non-academic applicants, a B.A. degree is required, and a graduate degree is encouraged.
Here is more information about the 2027-28 theme, Rethinking Jewish Peoplehood:
Who is a Jew? What makes something Jewish? Is Judaism a religion or ethnicity, or both? What is Jewish peoplehood and (if such a phenomenon even exists) how is it constituted? These issues have been
interrogated in great depth by scholars of modern Judaism.
Research on premodern Judaism has, of course, considered Jewish identity and how it was constituted. But scholars who have ventured to interrogate these questions have largely focused (albeit critically) on those strains of premodern thought that gave birth to currently hegemonic conceptions of Jewishness. This theme year proposes to (re)visit the premodern past in a different register. We will gather scholars working to complicate our understanding of how concepts such as Jewishness, ethno-religion, peoplehood, Jewish racial and ethnic diversity, conversion, Jewish-adjacent practitioners, and Jewish belonging have been constructed and utilized in premodern Jewish communities and literatures.
While our research will remain firmly rooted within our individual expertise in late antique or medieval Judaism, this theme year will also push participants to consider how we can begin to integrate research of different periods on these questions—acknowledging that the construction of Jewishness has always been complicated, contested, and diverse. Specifically, we will consider how different historical models of imagining Jewish belonging might offer affordances for thinking about present phenomena. Our historical
research will be premised on the principle that the archive is not static. Perceptions of the Jewish past are constantly remade as texts and histories are suppressed and forgotten—through uneven patterns of preservation, publication, translation, and pedagogy. But we work in a moment where more of the archive
than ever is available to be reexamined, and Rethinking Jewish Peoplehood invites researchers to engage with the archive in ways that expand and even transform our conceptual frameworks for understanding what it means to be Jewish.
To learn more and apply, please visit https://lsa.umich.edu/judaic/institute/applications.
The Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan provides annual fellowships for scholars and artists from around the world to conduct research in relation to a given theme. Established in 2005 through a generous financial contribution from the Jean and Samuel Frankel Jewish Heritage Foundation, the Frankel Institute is the only one of its kind at a public university in the United States. The Institute is committed to interdisciplinary, multilingual work spanning ancient times
through the contemporary era. By combining intellectual autonomy with the ideal of a scholarly community, it offers global leadership in Jewish Studies.
The Frankel Institute provides an intellectually stimulating environment, promotes an atmosphere of openness, and encourages constructive criticism. It seeks to advance Jewish Studies globally, considers diversity and pluralism as fundamental characteristics of a public university, and emphasizes these principles in all endeavors.
