Our Current Fellows

Internal Fellows

Michela Andreatta (spring 2021)

Assistant Professor in Hebrew Language and Literature

Michela Andreatta is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature in the Dept. of Religion and Classics. A specialist of the intellectual and literary history of Italian Jewry in the early modern period, she completed her PhD at the Department of Oriental Studies of the University of Turin, Italy with a dissertation on Latin translations of Hebrew philosophical works in the Renaissance. Her investigation focused on the figure of the Jewish convert to Christianity and early Hebraist Guillelmus Moncada (aka Flavius Mithridates) and his collaboration with the famed Florentine humanist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494). Her study, published as a book by Olschki in Florence in 2009, has demonstrated the crucial role that Mithridates’ translation played in molding Giovanni Pico’s reception of Gersonides, eventually conditioning the latter’s burgeoning conception of Christian Kabbalah, with long-lasting impact on following Christian interpretations of Jewish mysticism.

Dr. Andreatta has been the recipient of several post-doctoral research fellowships and grants from academic institutions in Europe, Israel, and the United States, among them University of Oxford, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, the Rothschild Foundation London, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

In 2020, Dr. Andreatta has been awarded a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in support of her current project for an English annotated translation of Hell Arrayed (Hebrew, Tofteh ‘Arukh), the seventeenth-century dramatic poem on the afterlife punishment of the wicked by the great rabbi, scholar, and Kabbalist Moses Zacuto (c. 1610-1697). A first draft of her translation has been used by Los Angeles based company Theatre Dybbuk as the basis of their production Hell Prepared, which premiered in summer 2019.

During her fellowship at the Humanities Center, Dr. Andreatta will investigate the Hebrew translation of parts of Ariosto’s celebrated chivalric poem Orlando Furioso made by the Venetian rabbi and scholar Leon Modena (1571-1648). Through the close examination of the linguistic, cultural, and historical features of Modena’s translation, her study will reconstruct and assess the strategies enacted by the translator in the semantic transfer of Ariosto’s Christian poem into the Jewish cultural sphere. Contextually, it will address questions pertaining to the place of translation in the educational curriculum of Italian Jews, traditions of translation as a vehicle of acculturation, and the subverting potential of Jewish reading and translating practices in Counter Reformation Italy.

Orit Hilewicz (fall 2020)

Assistant Professor of Music Theory

Orit Hilewicz is assistant professor of theory at the Eastman School of Music. She received her PhD in music theory from Columbia University in 2017. She studied piano for her BA and music theory for her MA at the University of Washington. Her research interests include twentieth-century music and visual arts, post-tonal music analysis, and analytical approaches to musical temporality. She is currently working on her first book, with the working title Musical Images: Visual Arts in Post-tonal Music, which expands post-tonal music’s analytical toolkit by presenting models for listener-observers’ engagement with musical ekphrasis— the term for musical compositions that take other artworks as their subject matter.

James Rosenow (fall 2020)

Assistant Professor of English

Rita Safariants (spring 2021)

Assistant Professor of Russian

Rita Safariants is an Assistant Professor of Russian in the department of Modern Languages & Cultures (AS&E). She received her BA from the University of Washington and holds an MPhil and PhD in Slavic Languages & Literatures from Yale University. Her research interests focus on late-Soviet, post-Soviet, and contemporary Russian film and popular culture. She is currently completing her first book on the role of rock music in the last decade of Soviet cinema, is at work on a project about late-Soviet cultural production, and is a collaborator on an NEH-sponsored Digital Humanities project that explores the post-Soviet public sphere directly preceding and following the collapse of the USSR. Her publications include articles in the volumes MLA Approaches to Teaching the Works of Chekhov (MLA, 2016) and Ruptures and Continuities in Soviet/Russian Cinema (Routledge, 2018) and in the journal Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema.