Dr. Ranen Omer-Sherman receives Distinguished Faculty Award
Dr. Ranen Omer-Sherman
August 26, 2020
We are delighted to announce that Dr. Ranen Omer-Sherman, Professor of Comparative Humanities and the Jewish Heritage Fund for Excellence Endowed Chair in Judaic Studies, has won the University of Louisville’s Distinguished Faculty Award for Outstanding Scholarship, Research, and Creative Activity in the Humanities!
In her letter recommending Dr. Omer-Sherman for this honor, Dr. Simona Bertacco wrote:
The intellectual life of the department, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the university has grown exponentially thanks to the numerous initiatives Dr. Omer-Sherman has organized in the past seven years. These efforts brought to our city and campus internationally renowned writers such as David Grossman and Etgar Keret, as well as famous scholars such as Sander Gilman and Shachar Pinsker. Most importantly, thanks to Dr. Omer-Sherman’s scholarly activity, our university’s name has been attached, since 2017, to the prestigious journal Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, which is a testament to the esteem and recognition that Dr. Omer-Sherman enjoys in his research community. …
Dr. Omer-Sherman’s scholarship is rich and diverse: it weaves together comparative Jewish literatures, Hebrew literature, and cultural studies, in ways that move beyond the simple dichotomy between Israel and diaspora, to approach the Jewish experience in global and comparative terms. … The strength of his work, according to Professor [Avery] Kolers from the Philosophy Department, … lies in “his larger approach,” in his “reading whole intersecting and interacting traditions as a mode of inquiry into how people live and understand themselves.” And he adds that Dr. Omer-Sherman’s “deep engagement with Palestinian literary traditions constitutes a major contribution to the field of Jewish Studies.” In other words, Dr.Omer-Sherman has profoundly impacted the field of Jewish studies throughout his career, making the field more “open and receptive to new ideas and to innovative ways of thinking” [to quote Dr. Karen Grumberg of the
To read the university’s announcement, please click here.
