“It’s common for historians and the general public to say that there are little to no sources about women from the past. There’s actually a ton of material, but it hasn’t been integrated into the way that we tell the history of the city,” said Gribetz, an associate professor of theology who was recently awarded a $60,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant to work on her book. 

“I want to shift our focus away from the usual suspects—King David, Emperor Constantine, Sultan Salah ad-Din—and toward the many women who made contributions to the city,” she said. 

Jerusalem: A Feminist History will serve as a historical account of the city from Biblical times to the present—a period that spans more than 3,000 years. Instead of focusing on the city’s male leaders, it will highlight women from all social classes, from the queens of Jerusalem to enslaved women and servants from wealthy households, said Gribetz. 

A Heroine from the First Century

Among the featured women will be Helena of Adiabene, a first-century queen. A native of modern-day Iraqi Kurdistan, Helena converted to Judaism and made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. When she arrived, the city was suffering from famine. She used her wealth to import figs and other agricultural products from nearby countries. Thanks to her philanthropic efforts, she became a beloved figure in Jerusalem, said Gribetz.

“Helena is a woman from outside of the city who becomes a hero within Jerusalem. In the many centuries after her death, Jews and Christians continue to tell stories about her,” Gribetz said. “She’s actually a relatively minor character in the first century, but she helps us see new things about the city’s history.”

The city of Jerusalem itself is often personified as a woman and depicted in feminine terms, Gribetz said. 

“In our earliest written sources about Jerusalem, people imagine the city as a sister, mother, partner, or widow. That personification of Jerusalem often happens when the city is in danger of coming under foreign rule or destruction in times of war,” Gribetz said. 

New Insights From Tombstones and Old Records

Gribetz said the inspiration for her book emerged during her first years at Fordham, when the Center for Medieval Studies asked her to teach a course on medieval Jerusalem. 

“I kept noticing women in ways that I had never thought about, in terms of Jerusalem’s history,” said Gribetz, who taught the course for several years, beginning in 2016. “At a certain point, I realized that the way I constructed my syllabus was in line with this very standard narrative of Jerusalem’s history, but there were many other ways to tell that history.”

In the following years, she received research grants and support from Fordham, including the theology department’s Rita Houlihan grant, which allowed her to research topics that led to her book. She is currently living in Jerusalem, where she is interviewing scholars and locals, participating in city tours, and studying texts at libraries, museums, and archives. The texts include funerary inscriptions on tombstones from the Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic periods, as well as other archaeological remains, including from synagogues, churches, and mosques. 

“Our literary sources often focus more on men than women, so we have to get creative with the kinds of sources that we use to reconstruct history,” said Gribetz. “But there are still many ways to find traces of these women.” 

‘This History Belongs to Many Different People’

Through her book, Gribetz said she aims to push back against the idea that we’re limited in the kinds of stories we can tell. 

“If we’re creative with the questions we ask and the sources that we use, then we can tell history in a way that incorporates the stories of a much broader segment of the population, whether it’s in Jerusalem or in other cities or contexts,” said Gribetz, who has also written Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism (Princeton University Press, 2020). 

Gribetz will spend the coming few years writing the book, which will be published by Princeton University Press. In addition to exploring the history of women in Jerusalem, Gribetz said she also hopes that her book weaves together the stories of Jews, Christians, and Muslims and shows that the city’s diversity is a strength, rather than a liability. 

“I would like to think that my book may help encourage people in all these different communities to appreciate what a beautiful thing it is to share such a deep history with the city, rather than to compete over who has exclusive claims to it,” Gribetz said. “I hope that my book conveys how complicated, interesting, and beautiful this history is, and that this history belongs to many different people.”

The grants, which are for $60,000 and will last for 12 months, will allow both of them to undertake ambitious new research projects.

Translated Texts of the Church Fathers

Bruce, a professor of history, will use his grant to launch The Lost Patriarchs Project: Recovering the Greek Fathers in the Medieval Latin Tradition, a massive cataloging project that could take as long as a decade to complete.

His research revolves around monastic communities that thrived during the Middle Ages. To understand people who lived then, scholars rely on texts written in medieval Latin. Up until now, texts from that time that are translated from other languages into Latin have been overlooked, he said.

He’s identified over 90 authors who’ve been translated from Greek into Latin. Many were Christian authors who wrote mainly about theology, church doctrine, and heresy. These “patristics,” as they’re known, were considered “church fathers” at the time.

“While there have been studies on the Greek church fathers and the writing they’ve done in Greek, there’s been almost no study of how those works were translated into Latin, and how those Latin texts were read and understood in medieval Europe,” Bruce said.

“People just think ‘Oh well, it’s just a translation, and it can’t be that important. What can it really tell us?’ But the fact that people went to the pains of translating Greek into Latin and continued to read and copy these texts over the course of the Middle Ages is important.”

Since there is currently no centralized catalogue that researchers can use to access these texts, Bruce wants to create one from scratch. He’s already begun the work compiling and writing entries with help from Kasey Fausak, a Fordham Ph.D. candidate in Medieval History, who is supported by a professional development grant from Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

“The N.E.H. has been really generous in providing funding for this. It’s basically ground work humanities—going into the manuscripts, finding texts, and presenting them in a way that’s legible and will foster future research,” he said.

Slavery in the Atlantic World

For Miki, an associate professor of history, the grant will give her time to write Brazilian Atlantic: Archives and Stories of Illegal Slavery, a book about illegal slavery in the 19th-century Atlantic World that she has been working on for several years. The project, which she described during a 2018 research seminar at the Rose Hill campus, is a narrative history of the slave trade of Brazil in the mid-1800s that punctures the idea that slavery was primarily a United States-based phenomenon that was abandoned by then, with the triumph of abolitionist movements.

“Not only do we mostly hear about the U.S. South instead of Brazil or Cuba, but the U.S. North is often considered the place of liberty, where fugitives traveling on the underground railroad fled to,” she said.

“But if you look at illegal slave trade records, it turns out that a lot of the financing for [the ships that carried slaves]  came from New York City and Boston.”

Dispelling myths about slavery is something Miki has a lot of experience with. Her last book, Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 2018), tackled common perceptions of slavery in Brazil. Last year, the American Historical Association awarded it the Wesley-Logan Prize for the best book in African diaspora history.

“I’m interested in questioning these big stories that we take for granted,” she said.

The narrative of Brazilian Atlantic will center around the Mary E. Smith, one of the last illegal slave ships to be captured in Brazil in 1856, she said. It will be a character-driven book modeled somewhat on Amitav Ghosh’s In An Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale, (Vintage, 1994). The challenge, she said, is figuring out a way to weave together stories of characters as disparate as the slave ship’s captain, the financiers, and the enslaved passengers, most of whom were never accurately identified in the manifest of the Mary E. Smith.

As a historian, she said, it is her responsibility to resist the desire to write a story with a satisfying beginning, middle, and end.

“We want a clean arc of a story that’s satisfying. But those of us who work in the history of slavery know we can’t get that. The archives are full of gaps, because the people who sold slaves saw them as merchandise,” she said.

“Rather than glossing over them to try to tell a story that goes from point A to point B in the end, I want to write something that also captures those questions. If you’re making a jacket or a dress, do you only see the outside of the beautiful clothes? What if you actually saw the craftsmanship, the seams and how things are made? Maybe making those things visible is part of the process. These processes are important to understanding slavery itself.”

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this article and the works resulting from the grants do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Four years after it received a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Fordham’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center has successfully met its fundraising goal.

The 3-to-1 matching grant, which was the first ever awarded to Fordham by the NEH, required the center to raise $1.5 million before August 2017 in order to receive an additional $500,000 award from the NEH.

George Demacopoulos, Ph.D., professor of theology, the Fr. John Meyendorff & Patterson Family Chair of Orthodox Christian Studies, and the co-director of the center, said the award makes it possible to extend an invitation to the center’s first Dissertation Completion Fellow, Aram G. Sarkisian. The resulting $2 million endowment will also be used to create a Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence program.

The $1.5 million was raised via 533 donors who made 844 gifts and pledges ranging from $2.50 to $150,000. Fordham alumni, parents, faculty, and staff contributed 61 percent of the total, while donors with no prior connection to the University contributed 39 percent.

Demacopoulos said the pace of the center’s fundraising shows there is great interest in researching Orthodox Christianity. Although it is practiced by fewer than 1 percent of Americans, an estimated 260 million people practice it, primarily in the Middle East, Russia, and the Balkans, making it the second largest Christian tradition in the world.

“If the U.S. government and businesses want to be engaged in those parts the world where Orthodox Christianity is the dominant expression of Christianity, then the American population needs to have a far greater sense of its history, culture, and nuance,” he said.

Sarkisian, a doctoral candidate at Northwestern University, said he will use the fellowship to complete his dissertation, “The Cross Between Hammer and Sickle: Russian Orthodox Christians in Red Scare America, 1908-1924.” His research centers on an Orthodox Christian parish in Detroit that was riven by divisions after the Bolshevik revolution led to a violent split in Russia.

It was a time marked by the first “Red Scare,” as American authorities worked to ferret out those who it suspected might try to overthrow the government and institute Communism.

Sarkisian said that parish members, who’d up until then relied on the Russian government for support, found it advantageous to work with U.S. authorities, and in some cases accuse each other of being Bolsheviks, in an attempt to display patriotism.

It’s also a story that resonates with him personally, Sarkisian said. His grandfather was an Orthodox Christian priest in Detroit, and Sarkisian used documents that he discovered in his grandfather’s basement as source material for his dissertation.

The fellowship will enable Sarkisian to access more resources through locations such as the Orthodox Church of America’s chancellery in Syosset, New York, Columbia University, and St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in Crestwood, New York.

“When the fellowship was listed, I thought the timing and the location was absolutely perfect for me,” said Sarkisian. “Everything lined up in a really wonderful way. Thanks to the fellowship, I’m going to be reaching an end.”

Demacopoulos said Sarkisian’s research fits perfectly with the center’s goals because its focus on xenophobia, nativism, and war resonate in today’s current political climate. It’s also the kind of project that advances Orthodox Christian studies as a field in its own right.

“A project like this impacts issues of political science, sociology, theology, and religious studies,” he said. “Its multi-disciplinary approach really drew us in.”

Their goal was to emphasize the dangers associated with the unrestricted Web, especially pornography and gender mixing. Rabbinic leaders discussed the internet’s encroachment on ultra-Orthodox Jewish values in an age they dubbed “a crisis of emune (faith).”

Nearly five years later, Ayala Fader, Ph.D., an associate professor of anthropology, sees this challenge in the ultra-Orthodox community as a critical moment of cultural and religious change. She said the internet has amplified existing tensions among the ultra-Orthodox. There is a sense that more and more ultra-Orthodox Jews are leaving their communities or losing faith, but continuing to practice publicly— living what they call “double lives.”

As a result, Fader said, the internet has become a nexus for these concerns, with leadership trying to control its use and those living double lives using it as a lifeline to connect with other religious doubters.

“I don’t know if so many more people are leaving than a decade earlier or if they’re just louder, more public, and more well-organized, but I think there’s a sense in the communities that this is a moment when they need to start thinking about how they’re going to move into the 21st century,” said Fader, author of Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn (Princeton University Press, 2009)

Fader has been awarded a $50,400 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for her forthcoming book, Double Life: Faith, Doubt and the internet, which examines the community’s contemporary struggle to define authentic ultra-Orthodoxy.

“I was thrilled to be awarded the fellowship. It will give me sustained time to just focus on writing the book,” said Fader, who has been conducting research on this topic since 2013.

Fader first began the project by connecting with ultra-Orthodox Jews who had, during the mid-2000s, been active on the J-blogosphere, a Jewish blogging community. After interviewing members of various forums and Jewish blogging sites, she learned that the internet gave ultra-Orthodox Jews living double lives an opportunity to explore secular knowledge and activities, like going out together, and learning to bicycle and ski. It also provided a space where they could anonymously critique their communities and their rabbinic leadership.

“There are a lot of reasons that led people to lose faith in the kind of ultra-Orthodoxy they were living,” said Fader, who noted that the community had adapted to other types of technologies in the past—from newspapers and radio to television and books—without as much difficulty. “The internet is problematic because people need to use it for business. You can’t throw out the internet and you can’t keep it out. It’s also easily accessed, privately.”

Watch Ayala Fader discuss the ultra-Orthodox community’s response to “kosher” cellphones. 

To better influence their constituency to resist the lure of the internet, many rabbinic leaders are working closely with ultra-Orthodox schools.

“If you don’t agree to sign a contract when your children begin school [pledging]that you won’t have the internet at home, [and]that you won’t have a smartphone, then your kids can be denied access to school,” said Fader. “There are people who have left their communities—not because they didn’t have access to smartphones but because they didn’t feel they could continue to live these kinds of double lives.”

In recent years, there have been a few compromises allowing for some use. In 2013, the cell phone company Rami Levy Communications began selling “kosher smartphones” or rabbi-approved mobile phones that filter and block content considered immoral. Samsung, one of the world’s largest tech companies, debuted its first kosher smartphone specifically for ultra-Orthodox users last year.

Yet, despite efforts to permit some access to the Web, there is still a push to position smartphones as dangerous or contaminating objects, said Fader.

“There is a movement to not carry smartphones out in public, and an effort by educators in particular to create a sense of shame in having them,” said Fader.

She said the constant tug of war between the internet and religion isn’t limited to the ultra-Orthodox faith. It exists in many insular religious communities around the world.

“For religious communities that attempt to control their members’ access to the wider world, the internet is both an incredible tool and a dangerous piece of technology,” she said.

For Lise Schreier, Ph.D., there is much to be learned from an especially heinous practice that thrived in Europe from the mid-15th century to the early 19th century: child-gifting, the act of bringing dark-skinned children from Ghana, Senegal, and India to Europe, and offering them as presents to high society women.

In “Toying with Blackness,” a talk she presented on Jan. 19 at Fordham Law’s Center on Race, Law & Justice, Schreier, an associate professor of French, shared some of the research that she’s been conducting as part of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant toward publication of a book, Playthings of Empire: Child-Gifting and the Politics of French Femininity.

In the story, a black girl named Raïssa is “rescued” from a black abuser and given to a white French girl named Mady. Raïssa is portrayed as grateful for being rescued from her abuser, and Mady is thrilled to have a new “toy.”

“But the story doesn’t end here, because as you know, there is no such thing as a free gift. In exchange for her new plaything, the French girl is expected to behave in very specific ways. More to the point, the black ‘toy’ is what turns her into a proper, obedient French citizen,” Schreier said.

One of the things Schreier finds interesting here is the fact that Mady was not the only little girl to get a gift. Her young readers also got a gift: the magazine itself.

“We all know how it works: if you behave, you get a toy. If you don’t, no present for you. It’s important to realize that the story of the black child being gifted to the white child was itself a present to good little French girls.”

One baffling aspect of Blanche et Noire was that it was ostensibly set in the 1920s, even though slavery was abolished in France by then, said Schreier. And Saint-Domingue, where Raïssa was supposed to come from, had become independent and was already renamed Haiti by then. Schreier said this deliberate amnesia about the past is further proof that blacks’ lives didn’t really matter in France—even in the early 20th century.

“The idea that you can have a fictional character [in the 1920s]and decide that she’s a slave, and then have another character buy her and offer her as a toy, is depicted as completely normal,” she said.

“Add the fact that the black character is not only an object but is also ahistorical. That tells us a lot about the ways in which blacks were objectified at various levels and for a very specific purpose, which is educating French girls.”

Little of this history is known in the United States, Schreier said. The conversation among attendees following her Jan. 19 presentation therefore focused on the different ways in which slavery was practiced on the two continents. As such, the images from Lisette are often unsettling to American audiences.

“When you talk about children’s literature—which is connected with tenderness, presents, family, and domesticity—you don’t necessarily think about racial subjection.

“And yet these are very powerful hidden mechanisms,” she said, “so it’s even more important to understand them.”

Fordham is one of 28 colleges and universities to win a Next Generation PhD matching grant, which aims to overhaul doctoral programs in the humanities to better prepare students for 21st-century job prospects within and outside of academia.

“The future of doctoral training in the humanities depends on innovative models that will deliver the competencies and skills that doctorate holders need to succeed in a variety of career pathways, in addition to traditional faculty lines,” said Eva Badowska, PhD, dean of GSAS and grant director, alongside co-director, Matthew McGowan, PhD, associate professor of classics.

“As a graduate school within a Jesuit university recognized for its strengths in the humanities, GSAS is uniquely situated to ask what it means truly to prepare our doctoral candidates for the fast-changing world of higher education and for the new knowledge economy,” Badowska said.

Historically, doctoral programs have prepared graduates solely for work in academia. However, with a 30 percent decline in academic job postings in the humanities since 2008, this singular focus is no longer realistic for students graduating from these programs.

“Thousands of professors are currently in the business of preparing thousands of graduate students for jobs that don’t exist,” Leonard Cassuto, PhD, professor of English and a collaborator on the project, said in his recent book, The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It (Harvard University Press, 2013).

The $25,000 planning grant, to be matched by an additional $25,000 from GSAS, will not only propose rethinking Fordham’s five doctoral programs in the humanities (classics, English, history, philosophy, and theology), but will also examine what a 21st-century PhD program at any institution should encompass. For instance, what advanced transferrable skills should be taught at the doctoral level? Should skills such as collaborative teamwork and advanced digital proficiency be treated on a par with traditional emphases, such as mastery of field-specific knowledge and independent research skills?

In addition to Badowska and McGowan, the project includes a Core Planning Group and Constituent Advisory Group comprising GSAS faculty, current doctoral candidates, alumni, and community leaders who would benefit from hiring graduates with doctoral-level expertise.

At the end of the academic year, the group will produce a white paper detailing the proposed model.

“We want to rethink how we deliver the PhD at our University, but also make it scalable to other institutions and humanities programs,” said Melissa Labonte, PhD, associate dean of GSAS and associate professor of political science. “To do right by the students in these programs, we need to rethink the entire model. This planning grant will allow us to begin this process.”

A key part of the grant will address making doctoral programs in the humanities more inclusive of underrepresented, underserved, and marginalized communities, Labonte said. Within these groups, the percentage of students who enroll in a doctoral-level program has dropped precipitously in recent decades.

“We’re trying to find ways to counter this trend,” Labonte said. “This part of the grant falls very much in line with Fordham’s mission. If we’re going to embrace progressivism and social justice models, then we have to think about how PhD programs in the humanities will address the needs of people from underserved communities.”

The NEH announced the Next Generation PhD grants winners on Aug. 9 as part of $79 million in grants for 290 humanities projects and programs across the country, an initiative the group undertook to mark its 50th anniversary year.

The grant will allow Lise Schreier, PhD, an associate professor of French, to devote the 2016-17 academic year to completing research on her forthcoming book, The Playthings of Empire: Child-Gifting and the Politics of French Femininity.

“A grant such as this is significant for the Department of Modern Languages and Literature because it makes us visible as strong researchers,” said Schreier, whose specializations include 19th-century French literature, French colonialism, and race and racism.

“We are a research-oriented department with a variety of courses. Teaching language is a pathway to understanding various cultures.”

Schreier, a native of Saint-Étienne, France, is studying the 18th-century phenomenon of child-gifting, the practice of purchasing or kidnapping dark-skinned children in Senegal, Algeria, India, and the Ottoman Empire as travel souvenirs and fashion accessories for upper-class French women.

Archival material about child-gifting is scant, and few scholars have undertaken research on the practice. Schreier’s own investigation has required some creative thinking as she shifted from letters to literature to artwork searching for clues of these children’s existence.

Some evidence came from mentions of the children in letters between wealthy French women. “Other information comes up in places like letters to tailors, which shows how these children were dressed, where they lived in the castles, how much money was spent on them,” she said.

Schreier is also interested in later references to child-gifting that appear in books assigned to French schoolchildren, which often involved a young character who was given a dark-skinned child as a gift. She argues that even after the abolition of slavery in France, when the actual practice of child-gifting ended, these stories served to inculcate colonial ideals in young French citizens.

The message of the books, Schreier said, was that “the French had to raise their children in such a way as to make them good, strong colonial citizens. This started in schools—particularly with girls, who were used to reading books about dolls, reading how to interact with a doll, raise a doll, educate a doll.

“These young readers, already used to being responsible for a doll, would be given a book in which an African boy was gifted to a French child in place of a doll. The inference they were expected to make was that it was normal to take care of a black child, just like a doll. When they’re older, it was hoped, they’d already be used to thinking of colonial subjects as their responsibility.”

This also points to the significant role that women played in advancing French colonialism, Schreier contends.

“From paintings of Old Regime noblewomen adorned with flattering attestations to their wealth, to 1870s moralistic novels featuring women advancing the Third Republic’s ‘civilizing mission’ with the loyal help of their dark-skinned charges, the child-gift motif articulated evolving models of femininity in a trans-national France,” she wrote in the grant narrative.

The NEH is an independent federal agency created as a result of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965. Of the more than 1,200 applications each year, less than 7 percent of applicants receive one of the coveted grants.