Updates from the Outgoing and Incoming Postdoctoral Fellows

UPDATES FROM THE SAVA RANISAVLJEVIC POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW

CHARLES A. MCDONALD, OUTGOING FELLOW

The two years I have spent as the Sava Ranisavljevic Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern have been enormously productive and rewarding. Despite beginning this position at the height of the COVID pandemic (and therefore working remotely for the first year), I have been fortunate to have been welcomed by colleagues and students alike into Northwestern’s vibrant intellectual community. The Sava Ranisavljevic Postdoctoral Fellowship furnished both the time and the funding necessary to make progress on my first book and to begin my next project. In the fall of 2020, I submitted the final revised version of my article, “Rancor: Sephardic Jews, Spanish Citizenship, and the Politics of Sentiment,” to the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History, where it was published in the summer of 2021. Shortly thereafter, I submitted the first draft of my chapter, “Sephardic Citizenship and the Ethics of Refusal,” the finished version of which will appear later this year in Dalia Kandiyoti’s and Rina Benmayor’s expansive and timely edited volume, Reparative Citizenship in Spain and Portugal: Sephardi Jews, Reconciliation, and Return, eds. (Berghahn Books). Several colleagues graciously offered to look over parts of my book manuscript and proposal, which are in far better shape now thanks to their kind, but unsparing, interventions. Thanks to them and the significant research time that the postdoc allowed, I will finish my book manuscript and a much-revised proposal during the final months of my tenure this summer.

My experience with the students at Northwestern has been nothing short of inspiring. At a moment of such deep uncertainty, turmoil, sickness, and death, they continued to show up, to think together, to support each other, and to critically appraise and create scholarship. In 2021, I launched a new course, “Jews and Muslims in Contemporary Spain,” which has proven attractive to students both during its first year on Zoom and again this year, when a packed class of talented, inventive, and deeply funny students took its second iteration in-person. I offered students the option to submit a wide range of final projects, which have included several podcasts about race, religion, and tourism; design projects that ask how typefaces might facilitate a politics of convivencia; video documentaries about the place of Arabs and Muslims fighting with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, and several sophisticated research papers spanning multiple disciplines. In both years, I also taught “Global Im/Mobilities: Borders, Migration, and Citizenship,” which I first developed in my previous position at Rice University and extensively reconfigured for my NU students. Together, we considered the politics of mobility and im/mobility across a range of geographic and historical contexts. A final, completely unexpected, development at Northwestern was the relationship I developed with SPAN (The Sexualities Project at Northwestern). After participating in their popular Faculty Reading Groups as a reader in 2021, I applied for and received a Faculty Research Grant to conduct pilot research for my second book, Queer Nightlife Ecologies: Arts of the Underground in the Era of COVID. In 2022, this research became the basis for my own

Faculty Reading Group on “Queer Nightlife.” Like my work on the return of Jews and Judaism in Spain, this project is concerned with political subjectivity, ethics, kinship, and the forms of care that marginalized communities develop. I am filled with immense gratitude for what this postdoc has given me, and I hope that I have been able to repay that gift in some small part through my teaching and research. Particularly in the time of COVID and Zoom, intellectual community is so crucial, and I was lucky to have found it in spades at Northwestern. This summer, I will be returning to my home in New York, where I will be a Scholar-in-Residence at NYU’s King Juan Carlos Center in 2022-2023 and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish in Spring 2023. I’m thrilled about this next step, and I know that it would not have been possible without the many kinds of support that I received from colleagues in Spanish and Portuguese, Jewish Studies, and Anthropology, as well as the incredible students that we are all privileged to teach. Thank you to everyone for this special time with you.

RODRIGO GARCÍA-VELASCO, INCOMING FELLOW

Iam honored and thrilled about joining the Department of Spanish & Portuguese this coming Fall as the Sava Ranisavljevic Postdoctoral Fellow in Judaeo-Spanish Studies. I will be crossing the pond from the United Kingdom, where I have spent more than a decade researching and teaching medieval Spanish and Mediterranean history at Cambridge, Oxford, and the School of Oriental & African Studies in London. I am originally from Madrid, Spain, where I grew up with family ties to Valencia and Galicia. In more recent times, however, my research has taken me to many unexpected regions of the Peninsula: from Coimbra or Alcobaça in Portugal, and Tortosa or Lleida in Catalonia, to Tudela and Pamplona in the historic Basque regions of Navarre. In each of these places, I have investigated the presence of Jews and Muslims in local ecclesiastical and municipal archives, following their trail in a variety of Latin Christian legal documents. My first book, which I will work towards completion at Northwestern, is entitled Jews and Muslims Before the Law in Christian Iberia. It seeks to reframe how scholars approach the issue of Jewish-Muslim-Christian convivencia. Instead of questioning the extent to which these groups were tolerated or not on the basis of our own preconceptions of what “tolerance” is, I examine how peaceful and violent inter-religious interactions were mediated through the law and archival practices. Specifically, I query how legal texts and archives re-defined the place of Jewish and Muslim groups in Christian society, and how these new legal definitions of religious difference were then used as tools of Christian hegemony and political legitimation. At Northwestern, I will be designing courses on the Jews of Spain, convivencia, and cultural contact in medieval Iberia. I look forward to teaching students from a wide range of disciplines, and to be able to share my intellectual curiosities and experiences with them, as with the rest of my colleagues in the Department.