Biography:
Dr. Laura S. Levitt is a Professor of Religion, Jewish Studies and Gender at Temple University. For the 2012-13 academic year she is chairing the Department of Religion. She served as the Director of the Women's Studies Program from 2009-2001 and coordinated the
Greater Philadelphia Women's Studies Consortium (GPWSC) from 2006-2010. Levitt was one of the founders of the Jewish Studies Program at Temple and, for many years, served as its director. She received an A.B. ('82) in Religious Studies from Brown University, an M.A. ('86) in Jewish Studies from Hebrew Union College-JIR, and a Ph.D. in Religion and a Women's Studies Certificate ('93) from Emory University.
Levitt is the author of American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust (2007) and Jews and Feminism: the Ambivalent Search for Home (1997). She is co-editor with Miriam Peskowitz of Judaism since Gender (1997); and with Shelley Hornstein and Laurence Silberstein an editor of Impossible Images: Contemporary Art after the Holocaust(2003). With Rebecca Alpert she co-edited "Jewish Feminist and Our Fathers," a special issue of Bridges 14.1(Spring 2009) and she is the editor of "Changing Focus: Family Photography and American Jewish Identity," The Scholar & Feminist Online, 1.3 (Winter 2003).
Levitt is currently at work on a new project about Criminal Archives, the materials in police storage rooms and their relationship to issues of justice and collected memories. Her project, tentatively titled Evidence as Archive, is a highly interdisciplinary work that builds on her prior work in feminist theory and Holocaust studies in order to take more seriously criminal evidence held in police storage as a repository of memory. It uses this evidence to rematerialize the stuff of archives even as it uses the vast body of recent scholarship on archives and memory, to make more visible the power of these otherwise invisible police collections and those who maintain them.
Link to C.V.
Levitt is the author of American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust (2007) and Jews and Feminism: the Ambivalent Search for Home (1997). She is co-editor with Miriam Peskowitz of Judaism since Gender (1997); and with Shelley Hornstein and Laurence Silberstein an editor of Impossible Images: Contemporary Art after the Holocaust(2003). With Rebecca Alpert she co-edited "Jewish Feminist and Our Fathers," a special issue of Bridges 14.1(Spring 2009) and she is the editor of "Changing Focus: Family Photography and American Jewish Identity," The Scholar & Feminist Online, 1.3 (Winter 2003).
Levitt is currently at work on a new project about Criminal Archives, the materials in police storage rooms and their relationship to issues of justice and collected memories. Her project, tentatively titled Evidence as Archive, is a highly interdisciplinary work that builds on her prior work in feminist theory and Holocaust studies in order to take more seriously criminal evidence held in police storage as a repository of memory. It uses this evidence to rematerialize the stuff of archives even as it uses the vast body of recent scholarship on archives and memory, to make more visible the power of these otherwise invisible police collections and those who maintain them.
Link to C.V.