Teaching Fellows

Benny Bar-Lavi earned his PhD in history from the University of Chicago and is a scholar of early modern Europe focusing on intellectual history and the history of ideas. He is particularly interested in the roles played by Judaism and Islam in Christian and post-Christian political discourses, as well as in the religious and intellectual ferment of the Western Sephardic Diaspora. His book manuscript, Politics Against God: Judaism and Islam in the Political-Theological Discourses of Early Modernity, examines how Judaism and Islam became protagonists in the debates about politics and religion that shook Europe during early modernity, when the theological critique of Judaism and Islam metamorphosed into a political-theological critique of the Christian European “self.” His scholarship has been supported by the Association for Jewish Studies, the European Research Council, the Political Theology Network, the Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies, and the Division of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.