Introductions!!!
Dear Klal Rhetorica/H-Jewishrhetorics members:
I hope this note finds you well and enjoying the summer. I'm writing to follow-up on some of the suggestions made at our RSA meeting in May and to kick-off introductions. For those of you who want a prompt--please tell us
1) who you are, your rank/institutional affiliation
2)what research questions connected you to Klal Rhetorica
3) what you’re working on,
4) what you hope to get from the community
5) what you can bring/contribute to it
Here's my attempt:
My name is Janice W. Fernheimer, Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies and the Zantker Charitable Foundation Professor and Director of Jewish Studies at the University of Kentucky. I helped found Klal in 2007 because back then I had finished a dissertation on Black Jewish identity and was looking to connect with other scholars in rhet/comp; communications; English; comp lit. and Jewish studies who were doing related work on identity. I was and continue to be grateful for mentorship from other, more senior colleagues and had hoped to establish a network where scholars could help one another further their mutual research interests at the intersections of rhetoric, Jewish, cultural, communication studies.
Currently, I direct the Jewish studies program here in Lexington and have been working on growing the minor and enrollments in Jewish studies classes while simultaneously building a repository of Jewish Kentuckian's voices in the Jewish Heritage Fund for Excellence Jewish Kentucky Oral History Initiative along with my co-PI on the project Dr. Beth L.Goldstein. You can listen to them here--https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/catalog/xt72ng4gqc3f
Some of my current research interests are in digital humanities pedagogy, undergraduate research/mentorship, and bourbon history as it intersects with cultural studies and comics. Along with JT Waldman (author/illustrator of the Megillat Esther the Graphic Novel and Not the Israel Your Parents Promised You with Harvey Pekar), I'm working on a transmedia project called America's Chosen Spirit about the influence of Jews, women, African Americans, immigrants on the Kentucky Bourbon industry. The project includes a webcomic which will unfold across four seasons of 10 episodes each (Reconstruction, Temperance, Prohibition, Repeal); a podcast series; and a sip-n-study tour. The idea is that original oral histories and archival materials will both serve as the inspiration for the webcomic/podcast/study sessions and that each of those narratives will drive reader interest in the primary materials. We're also building a site in Omeka to house the webcomic/connect to primary materials. Right now, I'm energized by the new scholars I met at RSA and looking to continue the connections and help re-energize this list. I hope to pay forward the generosity and mentoring I've been lucky enough to receive by working with others and helping them connect!
2 Replies
Post ReplyThanks for starting us off, Jan. To (re-)introduce myself to the Klal, my name's Michael Bernard-Donals, and I'm a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I teach in the rhetoric program and currently serving as the Vice Provost for Faculty and Staff. When Jan invited me to become a member of the Klal when it was founded I agreed because there just weren't spaces in the field where discussions about Jewish matters, well, mattered. In a field where notions of identity formation, intersectionality, multiple literacies, and migration (among others) figured so centrally, it seemed strange that a Jewish perspective on any of those notions was pretty much invisible. I saw Klal as a place where we could have those discussions, and bring them to the attention of the field, or if not the field at least to people in it that thought these ideas were worth taking seriously. Some of the research questions that initially drew me to Klal Rhetoric included those I've just mentioned, but it was really my work on rhetoric's relations to memory -- and in particular to memories associated with the Holocaust -- that was the point of entry. Since then, I've also explored why, in rhetorical terms, the arguments about the Israel-Palestine conflict are so fraught, whether there is such a thing as "Jewish rhetoric" and if so what its features look like, and -- more recently -- what a rhetoric founded on nomadism, vulnerability, and potential violence has to tell us about contemporary higher education. My hopes for the Klal are that it can continue to serve as an engine for intellectual work as it has for me over the past ten years, and that it can function as a network to engage scholars and teachers who want to find others who share their interests.
1) who you are, your rank/institutional affiliation: Janice R. Levi, PhD Candidate, UCLA.
2)what research questions connected you to Klal Rhetorica: I am interested in the notion of rhetoric and how it is tethered to identity construction, maintenance, and performance.
3) what you’re working on, The history of Jewish presence in West Africa.
4) what you hope to get from the community: At this stage, I think learning more about the role of rhetoric in Judaism, recommended reading, and theorizing is instructive.
5) what you can bring/contribute to it: I hope my fieldwork and research regarding a Jewish history in West Africa and the oral narratives surrounding it, will be insightful.