Alumni News

Noam Sienna (PhD History, 2020) has been named a 2022-2024 Junior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography. According to the Fellowship announcement, the Society (a program of Rare Book School, which is hosted at the University of Virginia) was formed “for the purposes of advancing the study of texts, images, and artifacts as material objects through capacious, interdisciplinary scholarship, and enriching humanistic inquiry and education by identifying, mentoring, and training promising early-career scholars.” The Society’s members “endeavor to integrate methods of critical bibliography into their teaching and research, to foster collegial conversations about historical and emerging media across disciplines and institutions, and to share their knowledge with broader publics.” As one of only ten fellows chosen annually, Sienna will participate in Rare Book School classes, attend special workshops and seminars, and co-organize a symposium on book history. After two years of membership in the Society, Junior Fellows in good standing become Senior Fellows. Sienna is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN. Sienna will also be teaching “History of Modern Israel/Palestine” at the University of Minnesota this fall.

Adey Almohsen (PhD History, 2021) won the University of Minnesota Graduate School Best Dissertation Award in the “Arts & Humanities” category for 2022. His dissertation, “On Modernism’s Edge: An Intellectual History of Palestinians after 1948,” was supervised by Daniel Schroeter. In addition, Almohsen won the Jerusalem Quarterly’s 2022 Ibrahim Dakkak Award for Outstanding Essay on Jerusalem for his essay, “The Print Culture and Literary Journalism of 1960s East Jerusalem.” The essay will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Jerusalem Quarterly. As a follow-up to his award winning essay, Almohsen was featured on the podcast, “Jerusalem Unplugged” (June 8, 2022). Almohsen is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor at Grinnell College.

Serena Mauro-Brown (BA Art History, minor in Jewish Studies, 2021) has been admitted to the graduate program at the University of Edinburgh to pursue a master’s degree in Biblical Studies, where she hopes to apply her background in Jewish studies and her training as an art historian to the elucidation of ekphrasis (the use of detailed description of a work of art) in biblical narrative. We wish Serena Mauro-Brown the best of luck and look forward to learning of her future accomplishments.

Left: Spice container, c. 1950. Dabbah Judaica. Image courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Mia), https://collections.artsmia.org/art/60506/spicecontainer-dabbah-judaica.