HBI Seminar Series with Anabella Esperanza, PhD: “Embedded in the Flesh: Jewish Women and the Making of Modernity in the Late Ottoman Period”
About
Anabella Esperanza joins HBI to complete her first monograph, a social and cultural history of Jewish women during the modernization of the Ottoman Empire throughout the 19th century to the second decade of the 20th century, when the empire finally ended. Drawing on a diverse array of sources, the book focuses on bodily practices and rituals embedded in the material body, and conducts a corporeal exploration of Judeo-Spanish-speaking women’s daily lives from Istanbul, Salonica, and Izmir. It will provide new histories of Jewish women navigating modernity, with a special focus on the Islamicate world. Dr. Esperanza is a social and cultural historian of the late Ottoman Empire and Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) Jewry. She is a postdoctoral fellow at the Dan David Society of Fellows in the Faculty of Humanities at Tel Aviv University. She received her PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she was a fellow in the European Research Council Fund research group, “Regional History of Medicine in the Modern Middle East” and held a Rotenstreich Fellowship at the Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Esperanza’s studies have appeared in leading academic journals Pe’amim [Hebrew], Gender & History, and Journal of Women’s History.
