This seminar, specifically designed as the ‘integrative course’ for students pursuing the Designated Emphasis in Jewish Studies, will offer an in-depth introduction to some of the central trends and personalities in modern Jewish historiography. We will read (and read about) the founders of modern Jewish historiography, and then explore some contemporary trends in Jewish scholarship, according to the disciplinary affiliations of the students in the class. Students will need to write a 5000-word article to complete the course, using a bibliography that includes Jewish Studies materials. A subject-relevant seminar paper from another course may be used to fulfill this requirement, subject to approval by Jewish Studies faculty.

How does one write the self? Every act of self-narration, whether organized chronologically or fragmentarily, written in the first person or displaced onto others, presupposes a theory of subjectivity: an understanding of what a self is, how it is formed, and whether it can ever become fully knowable to itself. From its inception, psychoanalysis was deeply invested not only in theorizing the structure of subjectivity, but also in developing narrative forms capable of representing lived experience.


This seminar traces the long encounter between psychoanalysis and self-writing from Sigmund Freud through object relations theorists such as Wilfred Bion, Marion Milner, and Masud Khan, and into contemporary experiments in autotheory by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Alison Bechdel, and Maggie Nelson, all deeply invested in psychoanalytic thought. At the same time, the course will explore the often uneasy relation between psychoanalysis and Jewish modernity. Emerging within the intellectual and historical conditions of modern Jewish life in Europe, psychoanalysis remained deeply entangled with questions of interpretation, textuality, exile, assimilation, otherness, and secularization. By placing psychoanalytic and literary texts in dialogue with Jewish intellectual traditions and modern Jewish writing, we will ask how the problem of writing down the self becomes intertwined with broader questions of historical rupture, cultural identity, and relational existence.

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