NCJSS Welcomes Vera Kallenberg

The NCJSS welcomes Fulbright Scholar, Vera Kallenberg, a historian working at the crossroads of Jewish studies, gender studies, North American studies, and European studies. Currently, she is a research associate [wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin] at the Interdisciplinary Center for Gender Research at Bielefeld University and a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Research Training Group "Experiencing Gender. Constitution and Transformation of Being-in-the-World" where she focuses on intersectionality, experience, and knowledge production in historical perspective.

Vera received her PhD from the TU Darmstadt and the EHESS Paris in a binational German-French framework (Cotutelle) with a dissertation in history on Jews before the Frankfurt Criminal Court 1780-1814. Her German-language book, based on her dissertation, won the Arno Lustiger Prize as part of the 2019 Rosl and Paul Arnsberg Awards. Also based on this research, she recently published an article in Jewish Social Studies, "Jewishness, Gender, and Sexual Violence in Early Nineteenth-Century Frankfurt am Main: An Intersectional Microhistory" (JSS, 26, 2, Winter 2021). https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jewisocistud.26.2.04

Vera is particularly concerned with the relationship between intersectional experience and knowledge production in 20th-century Jewish intellectual history, feminist historiography, and critical thought. In collaboration with the department of contemporary history at Bielefeld University, she is currently working on the life and work of the pioneering women's historian Gerda Lerner (1920-2013).

Her current book project is entitled: "The Making of Women's Experience: Gerda Lerner In A Transnational History Perspective"