Dr. Leora Auslander is the Arthur and Joann Rasmussen Professor in Western Civilization and Professor of Modern European Social History at the University of Chicago where she was the founding director of the Center for Gender Studies and is a member of the Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies. Her research lies at the intersection of the micro and the macro: citizenship law and domestic interiors; clothing and colonialism; European regulation and everyday religious practice. At the Katz Center, Dr. Auslander will work on metaphorical eruvs in Germany and France between the years 1880 and 1970.
Dr. Auslander received her PhD from Brown University and has taught at the University of Paris, Potsdam University, the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, among others.
Dr. Mirjam Wenzel studied general and comparative literature, political science, and theater studies in Berlin and Tel Aviv. Afterward she worked as a research assistant at the Institute of German Philology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and earned her doctorate with a dissertation on the Holocaust discourse in Germany in the 1960s. She is the author and co-editor of various books and exhibition catalogs on German-Jewish art and cultural history. Her publications include essays, articles, and blog entries on questions of cultural theory, aesthetics, and museology, on representations of the Holocaust in the visual arts, photography, and film, on critical theory, and particularly on the life and works of Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor W. Adorno, and Hannah Arendt. She also works as a curator and has developed several international exhibitions.
From 2007 to 2015, Dr. Wenzel directed the media department of the Jewish Museum Berlin, where she was responsible for the presentation of Jewish history and culture in digital and print media. She has been recognized as an international expert on the digital transformation of museums ever since. She has directed the Jewish Museum Frankfurt – Germany’s oldest Jewish Museum – since 2016 and has been an honorary professor at the Department of Jewish Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt since 2019. She will serve as a visiting professor at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar for the 2020/21 winter semester.
