Jonathan Boyarin is the Leonard and Tobee Kaplan Distinguished Professor of Modern Jewish Thought at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has also taught at Wesleyan University, Dartmouth College, the New School for Social Research and the University of Kansas. Boyarin received a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1998, after receiving his Ph.D. in Anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York in 1984.

His research and writing combine his backgrounds in anthropology and Yiddish to point toward new pathways in the study of Jewish culture. His first book, as co-editor, was From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry (1983 and 1998), which served as an introduction for younger, English-speaking Jews to first-hand accounts of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. This was followed by Polish Jews in Paris: The Ethnography of Memory (1991), based on his dissertation fieldwork in Paris, and by a volume on the life history of Yiddish scholar Shlomo Noble. Further ethnographic and critical essays, including some dealing with the contemporary Lower East Side in New York, were published in Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory(1992) and Thinking in Jewish (1996). He edited and contributed to The Ethnography of Reading (1993) and Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace (1994). With his brother, Daniel Boyarin, he co-edited Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies (1997). His interest in Zionism, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and revaluation of diaspora in contemporary Jewish life is reflected in Palestine and Jewish History (1996) and (again with Daniel Boyarin) Powers of Diaspora (2002). His books in recent years include Jewishness and the Human Dimension (Fordham, 2008); Time and Human Language Now (with Martin Land; Prickly Paradigm, 2009); The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians and the Identity of Christian Europe (Chicago, 2009) and Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul: A Lower East Side Summer (Fordham, 2011).

This event was made possible by generous support by the David B. Gold Foundation. Staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research.