Andrew
Berns

University of South Carolina
Rose and Henry Zifkin Teaching Fellowship

Research Topic

Italian Jewry, Changes in the Land, and Wissenschaft des Judentums

Bio

Andrew Berns is assistant professor of history at the University of South Carolina. His research investigates the intellectual and cultural history of Jews in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean. He served as Viterbi Visiting Professor in Mediterranean Jewish Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has been a fellow at Villa I Tatti: The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, as well as the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. His first book, The Bible and Natural Philosophy in Renaissance Italy: Jewish and Christian Physicians in Search of Truth, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Professor Berns’s research at the Katz Center will explore the connections between environmental history and the scholarly approaches to the past advocated by Wissenschaft des Judentums.

Fellowship

2014–2015

Deepening our understanding of the intellectual revolution at the heart of modern Jewish history.