Our Directors

Nancy Harrowitz, Director

Nancy Harrowitz teaches courses on Holocaust literature and film, modern Italian culture, and on fascism and the Holocaust in Italy.  Currently, she is researching the history of Jews in Tuscany during the Jacobean triennium (1776-1799) and the subsequent development of civil rights and Jewish cultural identities. Her most recent book is entitled Primo Levi and the Identity of a Survivor (University of Toronto Press, 2016).  Professor Harrowitz has also published Antisemitism, Misogyny and the Logic of Cultural Difference: Matilde Serao and Cesare Lombroso (University of Nebraska Press, 1995), edited Tainted Greatness: Antisemitism and Cultural Heroes (Temple University Press, 1995), and co-edited with Barbara Hyams Jews and Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger (Temple University Press, 1996), along with publishing articles on Italian Jewish authors such as Giorgio Bassani.  She is coordinating the new major and minor in Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Studies. Read more on Professor Harrowitz here.

Ingrid Anderson, Associate Director

Ingrid Anderson earned Masters and Doctoral Degrees in Religion, with a specialization in Jewish Studies, at Boston University, where she has been teaching in the Kilachand Honors College, the CAS Writing Program, and the Jewish Studies program of the College of Arts and Sciences. This year, she has spearheaded teaching a new course, titled World Cultures of the Jews, which is a required course for the Minor in Jewish Studies. Her first book Ethics and Suffering since the Holocaust (2016) is a study of ethics as “first philosophy” in the works of Elie Wiesel, Emmanuel Levinas, and Richard Rubenstein.