The Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies is excited to announce that Clémence Boulouque, the Carl and Bernice Witten Associate Professor of Jewish and Israel Studies, has been appointed Associate Director of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies.
Clémence Boulouque received her Ph.D. in Jewish Studies and History from New York University in 2014 and served as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. Her interests include Jewish thought and mysticism, interreligious encounters, intellectual history and networks with a focus on the modern Mediterranean and Sefardi worlds, as well as the intersection between religion and the arts, and the study of the unconscious.
A graduate of the Institute of Political Sciences in Paris, Prof. Boulouque holds a B.A. in art history and a post-M.A. degree in comparative literature, and she was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University in the master’s program of the School of International Affairs with a concentration on the Middle East. Prior to resuming her studies at NYU, Prof. Boulouque was a literary and movie critic in Paris. She is a published novelist and essayist in her native France. She published Another Modernity: Elia Benamozegh's Jewish Universalism (Stanford University Press) in 2020 and is the series editor of Stanford University Press’ New Studies in Jewish Mysticism. Her most recent book, Nos apocalypses (Stock essais), or “Our Apocalypses,” a finalist for the 2022 Prix Medicis, surveys religious responses to epidemics and literary descriptions of diseases. The discussions in Nos apocalypses originate from Prof. Boulouque’s innovative undergraduate course “From Exodus to Coronavirus,” which she first taught in 2020.
Prof. Boulouque has been a member of the IIJS faculty since 2015, teaching courses on such varied topics as Kabbalah, the unconscious in Jewish thought, religion in film, European literature, and religion in public life. In her well-loved newest course, she teaches on “Religion and Nasty Women.” We look forward to working with Prof. Boulouque in this new, expanded role.