Ellen Haskell

Office: 2110 MHRA

Dr. Haskell is the Herman & Zelda Bernard Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies, a professor of Religious Studies, and director of the Jewish Studies program.

Education

Ph.D. in History of Judaism, University of Chicago Divinity School, 2005

A.M. University of Chicago Divinity School,1999

B.A. in Religious Studies and Anthropology, University of Michigan, 1997

Academic Positions

• Professor of History, UNCG, 2024-present
• Professor of Religious Studies, UNCG, 2018-2024
• Director, UNCG Jewish Studies Program, 2014-present
• Associate Professor of Religious Studies, UNCG, 2013-2018
• Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, UNCG, 2007-2013
• Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Judaic Studies, Franklin & Marshall    College, 2005-2007

Research Interests

• Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism
• History of Jewish Thought
• Medieval Judaism
• Jewish Responses to Christianity
• Gender and Embodiment in Judaism
• Metaphor Theory

Current Project

Medieval Jews and Christians shared a tradition inherited from the ancient Mediterranean world of reading faces for personal, political, and spiritual information. Among Jews, this practice was especially complex, since Jews both practiced facial interpretation and were its unwilling targets; precursors to racism were alive and well in medieval Europe. My current book project, Facing God and Each Other: Physiognomic Encounter in Sefer ha-Zohar, explores the cultural setting, techniques, and ethics of Jewish facial interpretation in the thirteenth-century mystical classic known as the Zohar. The mystics who composed this work interrogated physiognomy’s moral ambiguity even as they used it to determine who among their fellow Jews was worthy to receive secrets in a time of persecution. Studying medieval facial interpretation allows entry into broader cultural issues including power relations between and among religions, the history of European racism, religious and ableist discrimination, and interpersonal ethics.

Courses Taught

• HIS 241 Jewish Medical Ethics
• HIS 242 Jews, Bodies, Race
• HIS 331 Judaism and the Construction of Gender
• HIS 352 Topics in Ancient Judaism
• HIS 367 Modern Jewish Thinkers
• HIS 372 Topics in Jewish Thought
• REL 202 Hebrew Bible
• REL 215 Judaism

Selected Publications

• Mystical Resistance: Uncovering the Zohar’s Conversations with Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2016)
• Suckling at My Mother’s Breasts: The Image of a Nursing God in Jewish Mysticism (SUNY, 2012)
• “The Effaced Eagle-Man and Other Problems: Reincarnated Embodiment in Guf ha-Zohar,” in The Life of the Soul: Jewish Perspectives on Reincarnation from the Middle Ages to the Modern Period, eds. Andrea Gondos and Leore Sachs-Shmueli (SUNY, 2024)
• “The Power of Interpretation and the Interpretation of Power: Physiognomy and the Masters of Secrets” in Jewish Culture and Creativity: Essays in Honor of Professor Michael Fishbane on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday, ed. Eitan P. Fishbane and Elisha Russ-Fishbane (Academic Studies Press, 2023)
• “Countenancing God: Facial Revelation and Physiognomy in Sefer ha-Zohar,” Journal of Religion 101:2 (2021): 151-182
• “A Composite Countenance: The Divine Face as Mixed Metaphor in Jewish Mysticism,” in Religion, Language, and the Human Mind, ed. Paul Chilton and Monika Kopitowska (Oxford University Press, 2018)
• “Divine Domesticity: Marriage, Gender, and the Household in Medieval Jewish Mysticism,” INTAMS Review: Journal for the Study of Marriage & Spirituality 16:1 (2010): 48-64
• “Metaphor, Transformation and Transcendence: Toward an Understanding of Kabbalistic   Imagery in Sefer hazohar,” Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 28:3 (2008): 335-362