Expert meeting
30-31 October 2025
Hof van Liere – Prentenkabinet
Prinsstraat 13, 2000 Antwerp
To register, email to ijs@uantwerpen.be.
Cooperation
International research network RELICS (Researchers of Latinate Identities, Cosmopolitanism, and the Schools) and “Literatures without Borders”.
Funding
Generously funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) and the European Association for Jewish Studies (EAJS).
This expert meeting is organized by the international research group on Transnational Jewish Languages, recently founded within the framework of the Scientific Research Network (SRN) “Literatures without Borders. A Historical-Comparative Study of Premodern Literary Transnationality”, and supported by the Research Foundation–Flanders. In this meeting, the research group aims to engage the international research community in its ongoing conversation on the transnational function and supralocal cultural ecologies of Yiddish, Ladino and other Jewish languages. The meeting will include a presentation of the group’s research lines to date, with particular emphasis on the methodological and theoretical principles. Above all, it should serve as a forum for joint reflection on the conceptual frameworks for characterizing and understanding premodern literary translocalism, using multilingual and translocal Jewish literature as a case study. Where academic research into Jewish ‘minority languages’ traditionally tends to concentrate on documenting the individual languages, the research group focuses on the systematic exploration of patterns, convergences and discontinuities between and across Jewish languages and literatures. In doing so, particular attention is being paid to how they function between Hebrew and various local non-Jewish vernaculars and literatures.
Participants
Theodor Dunkelgrün | University of Antwerp
Michael Silber | Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Says Shems | ULB
Roni Cohen | Goethe Universität Frankfurt
Daniella Zaidman-Mauer | Freie Universität Berlin
Claudia Rosenzweig | Bar-Ilan University
Katja Šmid | Spanish National Research Council
Avriel Bar-Levav | The Open University of Israel
Harm den Boer | Universität Basel
Soledad Castaño | Universität Basel
Marion Aptroot | Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
Maxime Maleux | KU Leuven
Claudia Daiber | Universiteit van Amsterdam
Irene Zwiep | Universiteit van Amsterdam.
With a public evening lecture by Prof. Carsten Wilke (Central European University, Vienna) on Thursday 30 October at 20h: A Jew in Calvinist Anwerp: The Literary Enigma of the “Marrakesh Dialogues“.
