FACULTY
Justin Cammy
Associate Professor of Jewish Studies
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Send E–mail |  |
Office: Seelye Hall 203 |  |
Phone: 585–3639 |
Justin Cammy is a specialist in modern Jewish literature and culture. He received a Ph.D. from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, and a BA in Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science from McGill University. In 2011-13 he is the director of both the Program in Jewish Studies and the Program in Middle Eastern Studies at Smith.
Professor Cammy's scholarly interests in the ways in which Jewish history, politics and culture intersect are reflected his teaching which includes courses on Yiddish, Israeli, and American-Jewish literature, film, and culture, thematic courses on Holocaust literature and Jewish comedy, a history course on the Jews of Eastern Europe, and a broad survey of Jewish civilization. Most recently, he was co-director of the Smith Global Engagement Seminar in Jerusalem, an intensive course that introduced students to the religious and political history of the city during a month of site visits, seminar discussions, and meetings with local intellectuals, scholars, politicians, and activists.
Professor Cammy is the translator and editor of Hinde Bergner's On Long Winter Nights: Memoirs of a Jewish Family in a Galician Township, 1870-1900 and co-editor of Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon: Essays on Literature and Culture, which includes his own scholarship on Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem. His book, Young Vilna: Yiddish Culture of the Last Generation, will be published by Indiana University Press in 2012. He has been an associate editor of Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History since 2005.
In addition to teaching at Smith, Cammy has served as Mellon Senior Scholar on the Holocaust and Visiting Professor of English at UCLA in 2009, as visiting scholar at the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2007, as visiting professor of American Jewish literature at Oberlin College, and as resident faculty at the internationally acclaimed Yiddish summer program at Tel Aviv University. He regularly teaches or serves as an adviser on various projects and courses at the National Yiddish Book Center.
In addition to his teaching and administrative responsibilities in Jewish studies, he is a member of the Program in Comparative Literature, the Program in Middle East Studies, the Program in American Studies, and the Archives Concentration. He is particularly interested in helping students navigate study abroad in Israel and Eastern/Central Europe, and in assisting them to improve their language skills through participation in Hebrew and Yiddish summer programs abroad.
In 2006 Justin Cammy was awarded Smith's Sherrerd Prize for Distinguished Teaching.
