- Shai Ginsburg, Associate Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University, where he teaches courses on Israeli culture, game studies, critical theory, Jewish thought, and philosophy. His research explores Hebrew literature, Jewish intellectual traditions, and the broader contours of Jewish modern cultural history. He is currently working on two book-length projects: one examines the work of Hebrew author Sh.Y. Agnon through the lenses of reader response theory, reception studies, and political theology; the other investigates the emergence of modern Hebrew speech at the turn of the nineteenth century. In addition, he is writing a series of essays on Freud and Arendt.
- Yitzhak Lewis, Assistant Professor of Humanities, Duke Kunshan University. Yitzhak’s teaching and research interests include transnational writing and comparative literature in Spanish, Yiddish, and Hebrew; literary theory; and Borges Studies. He is author of two books. A Permanent Beginning: R. Nachman of Braslav and Jewish Literary Modernity (2020) deals with the Russian Imperial context of early modern Hebrew and Yiddish letters. Games of Inheritance: Kabbalah, Tradition, and Authorship, in Jorge Luis Borges (2025) explores Borges’ engagement with the Judaic, contextualizing this within Argentine debates about nationalism and literature, postcolonialism and aesthetics. He is currently co-editing a collection titled One Hundred Years of Yiddish Literature in China about the history of Jewish literature in China.
- Malachi Hacohen, Professor of History, Jewish Studies, Religion, and German Studies, at Duke University. He teaches intellectual history and Jewish European history. He previously taught at Columbia University, New York University, and Reed College. His research interests focus on Central Europe, the Jewish intelligentsia, and rabbinic culture – Midrash to Kabbalah to halakhic responsa. He is author of Karl Popper – The Formative Years, 1902-1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna and Jacob & Esau: Jewish European History Between Nation and Empire. He has published essays on the European Jewish intelligentsia, Cold War liberalism, and cosmopolitanism and Jewish identity in The Journal of Modern History, The Journal of the History of Ideas, History and Theory, History of Political Economy, Jewish Social Studies, and other journals and collections. His Jewish European history is both traditionally Jewish and cosmopolitan European. He has been a recipient of the Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship from the ACLS, as well as of Fulbright, Mellon, and Whiting fellowships and a number of teaching awards. He was a fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, and the IFK (Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften) in Vienna. In 2023 he was Leibniz Distinguished Professor at the University of Leipzig.
- Daniel Herskowitz, Smart Family Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the Department of Religious Studies at Duke University. Before this he was a research fellow and lecturer at Trinity college, Wolfson college, the Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and the Theology and Religion Faculty at the University of Oxford. He was also the Stanley A. and Barbara B. Rabin Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Columbia University. His first book, Heidegger and His Jewish Reception (2021) was awarded the Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Young Scholars Award. His second book, The Judeo-Christian Thought of Franz Rosenzweig, is forthcoming. He is the editor of Hans Jonas: The Early Years (Routledge) and Studies on the Jewish Experience (Brill).
- Rasoul Namazi, Associate Professor of Political Theory, Duke Kunshan University. Rasoul’s research focuses on the comparative analysis of Islamic and Western political thought. His book, Leo Strauss and Islamic Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2022), received the Delba Winthrop Award for Excellence in Political Science and was the subject of a symposium in The Review of Politics. This work offers a comprehensive study of Leo Strauss’s writings on Islamic political thought. He is also the co-editor of Leo Strauss on Religion: Writings and Interpretations (SUNY Press, 2024) and is currently working on a book-length study of early Islamic political thought in the Quran.
- Selina Lai-Henderson, Associate Professor of American Literature and History, Duke Kunshan University, where she is the co-director of the Humanities Research Center. The author of Mark Twain in China (Stanford UP, 2015), her work has appeared in The Yale Review, MELUS, Journal of Transnational American Studies, and as book chapters in Mark Twain in Context (2019) and Langston Hughes in Context (2022), both published by Cambridge UP. Her essay, “You Are No Darker Than I Am: The Souls of Black Folk in Maoist China” (PMLA, Sep 2023), is the 2023 recipient of the 1921 Prize in American Literature (tenured category). Her monograph-in-progress, “You Are No Darker Than I Am”: Writers of Transnational Blackness in Twentieth-Century China, reveals both compelling and competing transracial visions across different historic moments in China and in Chinese translation. She is also co-editing Canto Aiiieeeee! Cantonese American Reverberations in Literature, Theater, Martial Arts, and Popular Culture. She is on the editorial board of the American Quarterly, and is a non-resident fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.
