Nancy Sinkoff, Ph.D.
International Teaching Fellowship
2017-2018

Nancy Sinkoff is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History and the Director of the Center for European Studies at Rutgers University. Her fields of interest include early modern and modern Jewish history, East European Jewish intellectual history both in the Polish heartland and in its diasporic settlements and the cultural significance of the collective exile of Jews from Europe’s heartland through an investigation of survivors’ relationships to Europe and “home.” 

As the 2017-2018 International Teaching Fellow, Sinkoff was in residence at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research for a week consulting with staff and conducting research in the Visual History Archive for courses she will teach this year. One such course is about exile under Nazism and communism, and she wants to focus on Jews’ movement through the region. Professor Sinkoff will show clips of different survivors describing the same event, to illustrate how different people viewed the same event from very different perspectives, and having her students map a survivor’s trajectory through the Holocaust. 

Professor Sinkoff’s most recent publications include Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderland (2004), “Yidishkayt and the Making of Lucy S. Dawidowicz,” the introduction to DawidowiczFrom That Place and Time1938-1947: A Memoir (2008), and “Lucy S. Dawidowicz,” American National Biography.